Paper Faces
by websandwhiskers
Summary: E&C, eventual Meg&Raoul, based on the 2004 movie.  This is an AU, diverging from canon at the scene on the roof.  How might the story have gone if Christine was just a little more self aware?
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note: I've been a Phantom fan since I first heard "Music of the Night", at about age 9 - I knew I loved it immediately, but was a bit too little to really understand _why. _It was a few years beyond that before I listened to the musical score in its entirety and figured out that the guy who sang that song didn't actually get his girl. It was moderately traumatic (hey, I was 12). I've been an Erik/Christine 'shipper since - though I'll admit to being troubled about it. Erik is violent, unstable, and obsessive. Not traits one ought to seek out in a significant other. Still, I find their story compelling - so, here I am contributing yet another alternate (improved?) ending to their tale. I hope to actually deal with those issues that make me uneasy about them; I'll let you reader-type people judge whether I've done it well.

What spawned this particular story . . I recently watched the 2004 movie. (I've still yet to see the musical performed live.) It bugged me - it made me want to yell at the screen - that Christine seemed perfectly happy (or at least resignedly miserable) to let _everyone _else do her thinking for her. So here . . she doesn't. This is what might have happened if Christine had hit her point of no return in a slightly more timely fashion.

First few lines/lyrics are borrowed, to set the scene . . you should be able to recognize where it starts to be mine [hint: it becomes prose and not lyrics . . though I wove in a few lyrics, too. Hell, if you're reading this, you know what's not mine.

* * *

"What you heard was a dream and nothing more... "

"Yet in his eyes all the sadness of the world; those pleading eyes, that both threaten and adore.. "

"Christine, Christine... "

"_Christine..."_

Christine flinched at the sound of that voice, eyes going round. _No – no, not up here – _She waited for it to come again. There was nothing but the frigid wind, but it made no difference – he was here, she could feel it now. _Oh, Angel, why – _

Then Raoul was in front of her, his hands warm on her shoulders, his eyes unwavering and real before her face. "No more talk of darkness," he murmured, clearly thinking to sooth her. "Forget these wide-eyed fears." She met Raoul's gaze, her heart battering against her ribs like something trapped. _This cold cannot be doing my voice any good. The Angel would not approve. _She felt a bubble of hysteria floating up through her gut, dizzy lightness filling her head even as bile rose in the back of her throat. Raoul's hands were so very solid on her shoulders, but his eyes –

He did not believe her.

"I'm here," he pressed, voice hushed and low, a tone to be used with a frightened animal. "Nothing can harm you."

It was almost enough – it almost didn't matter, that he clearly thought her mad. She _felt _mad, teetering on the edge of a dream, and wasn't this what she'd wanted for so many years? Hadn't she imagined this so often, that her Raoul would come to spirit her away? Hadn't she imagined, as she wrapped her bleeding toes and prayed to do better the next day, prayed not to be thrown out in the street, the life that he must have? No living being could have had so perfect a childhood as the Raoul in her head – an untouchable, sparkling existence, free of death and pain, to which she might escape at any moment. He would remember her, she knew, some day. He would come. Hadn't her angel of music come?

But her angel had fallen and Raoul, who had loved her father's stories as much as she, did not believe her tale. His hands on her were suddenly heavy, the warmth of his eyes a leaden weight. She remembered the brightness of his smile when he appeared in her dressing room, all the boyish mischief she remembered still there, and if he was arrogant, it was endearing. It was only to be expected, wasn't it?

But he hadn't come for her; he'd been delighted and amused to see her, yes - but if he'd remembered her, it had been only in that moment. She had only to see the consternation on his face now to know that no ghost of little Lotte had shared their years apart with him. He had not imagined what her life might be, and he did not now. This creature she had become confused him, troubled him.

It would be so very easy to let him sooth her anyway – to let him take her away and shelter her, as he was so fervently promising. Yesterday, when she believed in angels, it might have been enough.

She stepped away.

"Christine?" Raoul's frown deepened. It looked very strange on his handsome, unlined faced.

"What must you think of me?" Christine asked, with a watery little laugh. When he reached for her again, she raised her fingers to her eyes and scrubbed away her tears – just happenstance, that it put her elbows up between them. "Listen to me, babbling about nightmares and dreams."

"You've had a fright," he insisted.

"Yes," she allowed, squeezing her eyes shut until she saw stars, then blinking, tears gone, the world settling back into focus. "Yes, but I think the cold air has done me good. It was very kind of you, to let me drag you out here. I was raving -"

"No," he assured her, far too quickly, and didn't reach for her again. "You were understandably distraught, after - my God, Christine, I could think this not a theatre but a madhouse! I will speak -"

She laughed – an inelegant, half-thwarted giggle – and then clapped a mortified hand over her mouth.

" – to the new managers," Raoul finished, something reticent creeping into his voice.

"A madhouse," she repeated, sighing unsteadily and hoping he could see in her eyes how sorry she was; she should never have brought him up here, but some part of her had clung to this, the very last promise of her childhood. "It – it is, I suppose, though -" she struggled to find the right words. "- it is a strange sort of madness, a kind of chaos that can be clarity all its own, that can be full of energy and life and -" He was frowning at her in utter lack of comprehension. "Oh, Raoul, it's always been mad, only – only masked," she tried to explain; she twisted her fingers fretfully, feeling as though something was missing. Her rose, she realized, looking down at her empty hands – she'd dropped it. "What you saw tonight is only what is always there, behind the curtain, at least until -" Christine swallowed queasily. She could feel tears gathering again, and pressed the heels of her hands hard into her eyes. She sensed Raoul's hand lifted towards her, and backed away, shaking her head. "- until poor Buquet," she concluded, forcing the words out on a shakily expelled breath. "Poor Buquet," she whispered. "That I cannot explain away."

"Buquet," Raoul repeated blankly.

"The man who died," Christine responded, soft and level.

"I hadn't thought – of course you would have known him," Raoul said, looking momentarily relieved to have an explanation for her hysteria. Then he frowned again. "I suppose I hadn't really thought of you living here, among -" he stopped, and seemed to think better of his words. "- all that," he finished lamely, gesturing at his feet.

_No, _Christine thought, lowering her eyes. _You hadn't thought of me at all, until you saw me on the stage, bright and shining enough to belong in your world – but it's only paint and mirrors. Only clever masks. _

"I heard a voice," Raoul ventured pensively, staring off into the snow. "All the theatre did, but I say it was only a man's voice, no spirit or specter. But perhaps -" he his frown deepened. "- perhaps a different sort of fiend, only a man, but a murderer -"

"No!" Christine responded instantly. Raoul turned back to her, brow still furrowed in determined concentration.

"Did you not just say -" he began.

"I dreamed," Christine insisted. "I dreamed Raoul, it was just as you said – I believed -" she looked down at her tangled fingers; they were growing white with the cold, her nails a deathly shade of blue. "- you will think it very foolish of me, but I – I dreamed that my angel of music was real." His hand settled on her shoulder, and she allowed it; her insides felt as wrung and twisted as her fingers, and as cold. "But the dream, it turned to nightmare – angel turned to monster -"

"But this voice," Raoul protested gently. "Christine, are you certain -"

"It was only in my mind that they were one in the same," she responded in a low murmur, eyes still downcast. "It was only the memory of my horrible nightmare that made me think of murder. This Opera Ghost, he has always been here – as long as I can remember, leaving his notes – but he only makes mischief, and very often, his interference is for the best in the end. I – I cannot think he would have killed Buquet. What sense is there to that?"

Her voice rose and trembled on the question, her mask of calm reason wavering; somewhere down in her throat was a banshee's despairing wail – what sense, what _sense? Why? Angel, why? _Yet she could betray him no further, holding her frail silence and keeping her eyes at the level of Raoul's very fine coat.

"You are describing a madman," Raoul objected. "What sense would he need?"

She wished fervently that she knew.

"We're all mad here," Christine whispered. "Isn't that what you said?"

"No, Christine, I never meant -"

"I know," she reassured him hastily, giving him a sad smile. She untwisted her fingers and brought one shivering hand up to his cheek. He was only dear, sweet Raoul, who had been her childhood friend, and could not understand that childhood had ended. It was a folly she understood well, and thus forgave easily – it was not his fault at all that she preferred the memory, the ghost of him, to the man before her. "I know, and I swear to you, I am now perfectly sane. There have been accidents like Buquet's before. The ghost is just – a peculiar sort of consultant, you might say. It is hardly his fault that . . that his voice became tangled up with my sorry dreams."

Raoul sighed; he stood close enough that his warm breath ruffled her hair. "An accident," he repeated, resigned. He reached up to take her hand and hold it before him, clasped in both of his. He studied it, as if her chill, pale fingers might give their own explanations. "I'd never thought of a theatre as a dangerous place."

"You've never climbed up into the flies," Christine pointed out. "You saw the commotion – he must have been running. He must have tripped, and the rope -" She could not finished the sentence; she wanted so very desperately to believe it. There _had _been other falls – feet caught in the ropes –

It was very quiet; his hands felt almost hot, compared to the iciness of her own skin.

"Christine, I'm so sorry about your father," Raoul confessed to her shivering hand. "I'm so sorry I wasn't there."

"There was nothing anyone could have done," Christine managed to choke out, though her throat wanted to close, and she had to blink furiously to keep her tears from falling.

"I could have been a friend to you, as I'd promised," Raoul insisted. "I can see - I won't make you speak more plainly, you've been through enough tonight, and I can see that you . . you love this mad place. I can't understand it, but swear to me you're safe here, and I won't interfere in it."

"I am safe here," Christine whispered, and prayed that it was true. "And I thank you."

"Will you allow me to fulfill my promise now?" he asked, releasing her hand and tilting her chin up to meet his so very earnest gaze. "Will you let me be a friend to you?"

"Of course," she answered, voice wobbling. "Of course we will always be friends."

"My little Lotte," Raoul said, and smiled; Christine felt vaguely as if her heart were shattering into a thousand shimmering pieces. _He did not think of me, all the time I dreamt of him – but here stands little Lotte's ghost before him now, hovering between us, so that he cannot see me at all. _She smiled back as best she could, and his whole face brightened – reassured as easily as that, that everything was now put right between them. "And as your friend, I should take you inside where it is warm. Your lips are turning very blue, little Lotte, and you're shivering like – like a struck gong. Do you have such a thing, here, in your orchestra pit?" He took her hands again in his, chafing them gently for warmth, and pulled her towards the door.

"I believe we do," Christine replied. She let him guide her, just for a few steps, but when he would have led her inside, she drew her hands away.

"Would you give me a moment alone?" she asked.

"Alone? Up here?" His brow furrowed again.

"Just a moment to compose myself," Christine hurried to explain. "A moment to go through my exercises, before I sing -"

"But I'd love to hear you sing," Raoul countered, smiling winningly. "I will stay here with you, and hold your hands, so the frost does not bite at your fingertips." It was such a dear, clever, _Raoul _sort of thing to say; Christine found that the bits of her heart could break all over again.

"No, Raoul, please," Christine retorted gently. "I need solitude, just for a few moments – you will hear me sing very soon."

"From my box," Raoul protested, "like everyone else! Let me hear you first."

"Please," she said simply; his face said clearly that he did not like it. He frowned, and Christine thought he would argue, but then the frown slid into a sad, off-kilter little smile such as she had never seen before on his face; he looked suddenly so much older.

"As my lady wishes," he acknowledged, and gave her a deep and courtly bow; he pulled the door softly shut, watching her through the narrowing crack all the while. It closed with a soft click, then silence; a long moment later, Christine heard brisk footsteps descending the stairs.

She turned and leaned back against the door, splaying her hands flat across the frigid surface, inhaling shakily, and closing her eyes. Across the rooftop, she head soft footsteps crunching in the snow, emerging from behind the furthest statue. Christine opened her eyes and saw an elegant figure in black watching her; she exhaled, and her breath was a plume of smoke.

"A fine performance," he acknowledged, and bowed his masked head to her. "But for whom was it given? Myself? Your Vicomte? Or perhaps you've assigned parts to us both – so who shall I be? Angel? Demon? Or, what was it – oh yes – _a peculiar sort of consultant. _How very _tamed _that sounds." There was a growl to his tone.

_I should be afraid, _thought Christine, but was only cold. "It was no performance," she answered quietly. "Or if it was, I forgot myself in the role." She pushed herself shakily away from the door, and walked to him. He was very still as he waited, but up close she could see that he was trembling. His breathing was rapid and shallow, his posture rigid, his fists clenched. The unmasked side of his face was pale and sallow, particularly about the mouth, which was ever so slightly parted. His heated breath created a small fog about his face, through which she could see him watching her almost fearfully.

All together, he appeared more as one who had just received a terrible shock, than one who had delivered the same. She reached out and took one of his gloved hands; he flinched violently, trying to jerk away from her grasp, but she clung, and waited, looking up into his face. He met her gaze with the wild, dilated eyes of a captured animal, staring as if spellbound, panting audibly. She could feel his pulse under her fingers, even through the leather glove.

_A creature trapped and panicked may bite, even the hand that would free it, _whispered a voice in the back of her mind as she waited, her own pulse rising to match the furious rhythm of his. She thought of Raoul, waiting in his box, warm and comfortable and surrounded by velvet and gold. She was mad to be here. _We are all mad here. We are all masked specters, all attended by ghosts. _Her angel's breathing slowly quieted, though it remained quick and tense; her pulse quickened its step as she looked down at his hand and carefully, gently pried his fingers open.

There were thin, sharp fibers embedded in the soft leather of the glove – little fragments of rope.

"Christine -" he whispered, and it was almost a sob. His shaking turned to shuddering, his whole body wracked with it; she wondered how he could even stand. A strange, frozen calmness had settled in the center of her body. Her pulse settled; her breathing came even and untroubled. She pressed his hand closed again, and then wrapped both of hers around it and pulled it to her, above her heart, so that when she ducked her head his knuckles were beneath her chin. So near to her lips, as near as she dared – she would have kissed his hand, as one kisses a child's hurts and promises to make them better, but there was the leather of his glove between them. "Christine -" he choked, seeming robbed of all language, save for her name.

"When I was very small," Christine began, "My father told me stories of many things – tales he heard as a boy, in the land of his birth. I remember it very little – I remember cold, and candles, and his voice speaking of things fey and wondrous, beautiful and terrible. When I came here -" her voice wavered. "- I imagined all of them living just under my floor, making the walls creak, whispering from the corners. I was so frightened, so sad. It was easy to conjure monsters – and easier to conjure friends than to find real companions." She looked up at him then, his hand still clutched tightly to her chest. "But you _were _real, flesh and blood, all this time – I imagined you, and you imagined me, and we're neither of us -" her breath hitched, and there was something hot about her eyes and cold on her cheeks. She hadn't realized she was crying. "- neither of us what the other imagined. You were sovereign of my fairy-tale kingdom, my Angel of Music – but you're not – you're not my angel -"

She hadn't meant to sound so accusing, or so heartbroken. She'd only intended to explain the horrible things she'd first said to Raoul, word she thought she had spoken in shock, in terror, in confusion. It was alarming to realize she felt neither frightened nor confused – she felt betrayed and abandoned and lost, just as she had when she first knelt in the chapel and prayed for the angel her father had promised her.

"Christine," he murmured again, miserably. His hand tugged free of hers and reached up to brush at her tears. The leather was cold.

"You killed a man," she said, and could have choked on the shame of that conspiratorial whisper, hating him for it. "Why?" She wailed, but so quietly.

His hand drew away, and he stepped back from her. His posture changed; he seemed almost to shrink. Her angel was a broken, shaking, beaten creature before her; she swallowed down a sudden wave of revulsion, all stirred together with love and pity and loneliness, all of it curdling in her gut.

"Why?" she demanded again, more sharply, and loathed herself for the touch of hot satisfaction she felt at his wince. She stepped towards him, so that they stood once more close enough to touch. "_Why?"_

"Would you have me caught?" he asked hoarsely. "Are you no different than all the rest of the world? Should I be caged like a dangerous beast?" His voice rose as he spoke, ending in a shout, his back straightening. She took a nervous step backward, suddenly uncertain.

"Caged?" she asked, frowning, shaking her head in confusion. "Angel, I don't -"

"I am no angel!" he thundered, looming over her; she stumbled back and tripped. He caught her elbow and pulled her hard against him. "I am a creature from the deepest pit of hell!" he raged, his face inches from hers.

"I don't understand!" she protested, shaking her head furiously, trying to pull away. Her hair whipped about her face. It caught on his mask, and the porcelain slipped, just a fraction of an inch. With a strangled cry he threw her away from him, his hand flying up to his face, holding the mask in place. She scrambled backward, lurching and stumbling; she stopped, sprawled in the snow, perhaps three paces from him.

He stood, shoulders hunched and clutching the mask, staring at her in stricken horror. Christine could only gasp for air, each breath a great, hiccoughing sob. She cradled her elbow to her chest.

"I am the Devil's child," he whispered. "Christine -" he reached for her, and she flinched; he pulled his hand back as if burned. "I – he – he pursued me! Hunted me!" His voice was rising again, not in anger now, but rather a desperate, panicked wail. "He'd seen me – I knew he'd seen me, he'd seen my face, I heard the sordid tales he told -" He was frantic, speaking almost too quickly to be understood. "- stories to frighten pretty girls, pretty girls – Christine -" His voice faded out, his hand lifting once more as if to touch her, and he took half a broken, thwarted step towards her before he reigned himself in.

"He was too close, Christine, too close, and tonight he followed me – followed me, chased me, just steps behind me, he would have hunted me down like an animal – I would have been caught -" he stopped, and swallowed shakily, and his voice went even softer. " – but that's not right," he confessed, in a strange, frightened tone. "Not right, is it? He ran. He found me out and – and he ran! He ran from me! I chased – I chased him, Christine, he was frightened – frightened of this monster who belongs in a cage -" His voice was horrible, a rasping, inhuman hiss. " – he ran, and -" He looked down at his hands, open before him.

Christine drew her knees up to her chest, huddling in her skirts and shaking her head in denial, crying.

"I felt -" He still stared down at his hands, but his voice had changed again. It was cold and hollow as the wind now, as quiet, as inexorable. "Christine, I felt – in that moment, he fell away – just fell away – and I felt – no one would ever cage me again. I was a god. I was free." There was no joy in his words, no human feeling at all. "No one would ever cage me again." He said it so softly she almost didn't hear. "Christine, I never meant to. I never meant to." He drew in a deep and ragged breath, and straightened, hands dropping limp to his sides. He faced her silently, awaiting her judgment.

Christine pushed herself to her feet with shaking hands, swallowing and blinking, forcing back her tears. On legs that seemed too weak to hold her, she walked to him. He did not reach for her, nor she for him. For a moment they just stood facing one another. _All our ghosts have fled, _Christine thought, _abandoned us to inherit this terrible, senseless world. We are all mad here. _"Who ever caged you?" she asked.

He did not answer, though she felt him tense, and begin once more to tremble. She waited.

Then he turned, so abruptly that she gasped, his cloak swirling around him like dark wings, and disappeared over the side of the roof.

Christine was, at first, too stunned to move. Gradually blood seeped its way back into her frozen throat. "Angel?" she whispered. The wind and the snow and the deepening dark did not answer her. "Angel?" Her voice rose in alarm and she ran, heedless of the ice, to the point from which he'd leapt.

There was no body on the ground below, no gathering crowd. Christine swallowed, and swallowed again, trying to force down the awful, almost painful pounding of her heart. He must have alighted on some ledge, or perhaps swung into a window. She started to lean over the edge, hoping to see where he'd gone. A gust of wind buffeted her, and her hand slipped on the edge, one fingernail catching on the stone and cracking down the quick. For a moment her fingers clutched empty, frigid air, and she felt herself go weightless, her feet just feathers beneath her, easily swept away. The vast distance between her and the earth below gaped wide and cold – her heart did not beat, her lungs forgot their purpose, her voice went still in her throat.

She lurched backward, stumbled two steps, and found her feet had grown solid again. Her throat worked, devoid of moisture. The air stung her wide, round eyes.

Christine stood perfectly still for several seconds. Then she cleared her throat, turned very deliberately back toward the stairs, and began to sing a tremulous scale. In a moment she was cursing herself that she had not done as she'd told Raoul she would, and exercised her voice. All that crying and shouting could not have helped. When the door shut behind her and the warm air of the theatre closed around her, it was difficult even to breath.

* * *

"Christine?" Meg Giry peered into the dressing room. "Christine, are you still here?"

"Here, Meg," Christine called from the farthest corner, beside the mirror. She sat curled into the wall, wrapped in her dressing gown and wrapping a bit of black ribbon about her fingers. A deep red rose lay on the floor beside her, beginning to whither.

"It's so late," Meg protested, tiptoeing across the room to her friend. "I was worried you'd gone missing again." Meg's eyes darted to the mirror, but Christine paid her nervous glances no attention; instead she made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob, and shook her head in fervent denial. "You were so brave tonight," Meg pressed on determinedly, hoping her words would be a comfort. "I don't know how you did it. It was hard enough for me to remember my steps, I know I could not have sung a note."

"My voice was not its best," Christine argued quietly, still staring down at the ribbon. Meg reached out and took hold of those tangled fingers; they were terribly cold. "Meg, you were right," Christine suddenly blurted out, her voice cracking.

"About what?" Meg asked gently.

"That – that stories -" Christine choked, swallowing rapidly, obviously trying to hold back tears. Then she gave in, and flung herself on her friend. Meg gave a small cry, startled, but Christine didn't seem to hear, sobbing desperately. Meg had not seen her so undone since they were little children; she wrapped her arms carefully about Christine's back, stroking her hair.

"Shhhh, it's alright," Meg murmured as best she could, though she felt unsteady and overwhelmed herself.

When Christine had first come to the Opera House, she'd done nothing but cry, and the other girls had mocked her – even Meg had gone along with it, she was shamed to remember, despite her mother's disappointed glaring. Gradually Christine had settled in, changing from their little banshee girl – a nickname a temperamental red-haired dancer had given her, for all her wailing, keeping them all awake at night – to a pale, silent little ghost. She never spoke to anyone, never sought their company.

It was only in the past year or so that Meg had begun to seek Christine out, finding something compelling in the quiet, serious girl – something the rest of her fellow dancers seemed to lack. Meg had taken a certain amount of grief for it, but she didn't mind – perhaps it was due to having her mother about, as none of the other girls did, but at times she felt years and years older than all of them. They cared about nothing but rich men and stolen booze, creams to lighten the complexion and pilfered cigarettes. One day Meg had found herself scolding a young girl with a new lover, exasperated at the girl's foolishness – yes, he gave her pretty things, he'd promised her an apartment and a life away from here, but what if he got her with child? She didn't _believe _him, did she?

It wasn't until the entire room full of flushed, painted faces had turned on her that she'd realized how very much like her mother she sounded. After that, Meg discovered she much preferred Christine's northland fables and talk of angels to the other dancers' gossiping – perhaps it was more childish still, but Christine was careful and solemn and serious about her voice. She never kept company with men, didn't smoke, and liked to read. When Meg wasn't dancing and Christine wasn't practicing her singing with her strange, reclusive tutor, Meg would ask her to read aloud, and she would, her voice full of the magic of foreign places and strange times. Meg's mother approved of her daughter's new pastime very much.

Meg wished her mother were there now; her mother had always seemed to understand Christine in a way that Meg, fond of her as she had become, could not. Christine was dear to her now, but still unfathomably strange. "Is it Buquet?" Meg ventured tentatively; she'd never noticed Christine to be particularly fond of the man, who was old and gnarled and altogether not that appealing, but then, Buquet had liked to tell stories, and this was Christine. Who knew what might turn Christine's head?

Christine shook her head no, tossing her hair into Meg's face. Meg reached up and plucked a few wayward strands from her lips, then resumed her soothing stroking of the other girl's back. "What, then?"

"You were right," Christine said again, between hiccoughs; Meg sighed as quietly as she could, and wondered if there was still anyone in the ballet who might like her well enough to share whatever manner of drink they'd found. Tonight, there would surely be plenty going around, and Meg thought that Christine might benefit from it. She'd be unused to it, and it'd likely put her straight to sleep.

"Tell me," Meg insisted gently.

"There is no angel," Christine confessed, in the saddest, most pitiful whisper Meg had ever heard. Half of her wanted to roll her eyes in exasperation – was that all? She'd finally realized her father's stories were only make-believe? But the strange, new piece of herself that had led Meg to befriend Christine in the first place heard her friend's heartbreak and mourned. It was inevitable that Christine would someday have to step into the real world, just as it was inevitable that foolish little dancers' lovers would leave them, and that in the sort of chaos that had reigned earlier, someone was bound to be hurt. It was simply the way of the world, and Meg was not often troubled by it – but there was something awful, something wrong about the idea of a disillusioned Christine.

"Hush," Meg ordered softly, pulling her friend tighter. "Hush, none of that. Of course there are angels, real angels up in heaven, even if the one you thought you heard was only a dream. It was a wonderful, useful sort of dream regardless, if it taught you to sing."

Much to Meg's dismay, that only made Christine cry harder.


	2. Chapter 2

"No!" Meg winced at her mother's voice, freezing in place. "No, no – not like-" this was followed by an irate exhalation of breath – something her mother only ever did in public. Antoinette Giry had never been incoherent in her life, so far as Meg could remember, but she did attempt to curb her tongue around the younger girls. Sharp footsteps stalked across the stage.

"Take a rest!" Madame Giry called out, with a dismissive wave of her hand. "But not you – you – or either of you!" she amended, jabbing an accusing finger at a handful of cringing dancers; her daughter was not among them. Meg sighed in relief and let her arms drop, then flexed her ankles and tip-toed off the stage. She was careful to keep her posture correct and her steps light and even; it was her mother's philosophy that dance was a way of life, and any random graceless movement might well result in Meg joining the ranks of the hapless girls now being moved bodily into the positions they'd failed to learn.

Meg waited as another girl took several long swallows from the jug of water they all shared, then took her turn; the mouth of the jug tasted of lipstick and sweat, but the water was cool. She took only a few sips, then passed it on to a girl who stood barely as tall as Meg's elbows; the child was flushed and panting. Meg felt off-kilter and restless, but not hot. Broken strains of viola and cello wafted over her as she paced at the edge of the orchestra pit, M. Reyer's ever-despairing voice mingling with her mother's sharp instruction and the murmurings of the various dancers and orchestra members fortunate enough to be the focus of neither. Overhead, she heard feet carelessly loud on the catwalks, boards and ropes creaking, coarse voices calling back and forth – trying, on the manager's orders, to determine exactly how last night's _accident _could have occurred.

There was a note of uneasy bravado in more than one of those voices over Meg's head; the softer conversations all around her were more subdued than usual, more somber. There was no childish giggling, no raucous male laughter, and the glances she noticed being passed between the second chair violin and Colette – a dancer two years Meg's senior – were more longing and afraid than they were coy and flirtatious, as was the couple's habit. Everything was off-kilter and strange; Meg hoped that it would settle after Buquet's funeral, but she'd heard nothing yet as to when or where the service might take place. Had the man died in any other circumstances, Meg doubted she would have gone; Buquet had been coarse, lewd, and constantly at odds with her mother. She hadn't liked the man, and doubted she'd miss him, but she liked his death less – the sudden frisson of real fear that accompanied talk of the ghost, her mother's foul temper and constantly searching eyes, and Christine, sitting on the end of her bed, arms curled round herself. Meg wanted to see Joseph Buquet put in the ground, final and done and over, before anyone had time to look too closely into his _accident, _or to start questioning why her mother seemed to know so very much about the phantom of the opera.

The initial shock of a twitching corpse dropping nearly onto her head had faded to hazy, dim memory; she could recall screaming, but none of the details, not what step of the dance had preceded his fall, not how he'd looked or whether there had been any sound. In the immediate aftermath there had been the remainder of _Il Muto _to distract her, and then Christine; it had been hours before she had a chance to think, and by then the experience was pleasantly blurred. She thought she had dealt rather neatly with the trauma of it, and she'd gone to bed congratulating herself on her soundness of mind - but then her thoughts had refused to settle.

Random fragments of memory skittled through her brain like spiders, as she lay there in the dark; Buquet with a rope around Regine's shoulders, and her mother slapping him for it. Her mother speaking to shadowed corners, startled when a childish Meg came up to tug on her skirts. Mother with brown-paper parcels that smelled of bread and cheese, tucked under the bed – a swish of skirts and the door opened and closed in the night, soft voices heard while half asleep – and the packages gone in the morning. Sometimes it was paper or candles, rather than bread, or paints or clothes, or other things Meg could not name. Once it had been a pair of very fine shoes, such as a gentleman might wear. When she was small these things had seemed just one more mystery to be attributed to the bewildering world of adulthood; as she grew bigger, her mother grew more careful. There were never explanations.

Two nights ago, when she'd found the passage behind Christine's mirror, there had been no explanation – just firm hands pulling her away, and a sharp-voiced admonishment not to borrow troubles that were not her own.

Meg glanced around at the other dancers, all grouped by twos and threes; her eyes found dark-haired, pretty Regine, sitting on the far side of the stage with her head on another girl's shoulder, talking too softly for Meg to make out the words. Buquet had tried to kiss her. Meg's mother had slapped him. Slapped him and pulled his rope tight around his neck.

Buried in the back of her mind, half-forgotten, Meg recalled a man leaning over her in the dark; she had been very, very small. She remembered that he smelled of damp and stone. _So lovely. She could become anything, _he'd whispered. And then her mother – _Erik, you'll wake her. _

It was barely a memory, just a scattered collection of impressions tied together by the sensation of a warm blanket tucked up to her chin and that smell of cold and damp, but when Meg had imagined, as a child, what it might be like to have a living father, it was this image that came into her mind. Her father's name, however, was not Erik. Her father's name had been Jules.

Christine thought her father had sent her an angel – or she had, until last night.

Meg felt eyes on her, blinked, and found herself meeting Regine's questioning gaze; she'd been staring, lost in her thoughts. Meg gave the other girl a small, polite smile, ignoring her confused expression, and turned away. She wandered a few restless steps, then tilted her head all the way back and peered up into the flies. The catwalks swayed like waves on some strange, inverted sea – or at least, so she imagined. Christine had once lived by the sea; Meg had never so much as seen it, though from Christine's stories, she could almost imagine she had. According to Christine, the sea knew when there would be a storm, even before there were clouds or wind or the smell of rain. It would grow angry and churning; Christine said that when the sea was in such a disconsolate temper, the waves would try their hardest to catch hold of your ankles and pull you down. If you wished to walk the water's edge and keep from drowning, she said, you had to be very careful of your feet.

The violas hit a jarring note, and M. Reyer gave a beleaguered wail – no doubt he said something long-suffering and scathingly witty, but Meg didn't hear the words, all her attention focused on the uneasy sway of the boards above her, the echoing of booted feet that she knew could be silent if they wished to be. It was as if the stagehands were purposefully announcing their presence with their shoes – as if they thought the noise would ward off ghosts.

Meg gave a disgusted, frustrated sigh and let her chin drop, then burst into impetuous motion, leaping and whirling through a series of improvised steps along the edge of the stage. She flung herself into jumps she knew were beyond her skill, careless of whether there was either grace or art it, just wanting the nearness of the edge and the stretch and pull and burn of muscles. Her blood roared in her ears, her heart thumped, and for half a moment she felt the strange, morbid spell of last night's tragedy shred under the violence of her movements.

Then she ran out of stage, and came to a rigid, frustrated halt. It was quiet around her; Meg was acutely aware of dozens of eyes on her from all directions, but turned first to meet her mother's inscrutable gaze, it being the heaviest of them all. Meg lifted her chin defiantly, saying nothing, and earning the same in return; her mother just watched her assessingly for a long moment, then turned back to her pupils. Behind her, M. Reyer rapped his baton sharply against a music stand, calling for the orchestra's attention.

Overhead, one of the stagehands whistled appreciatively; Meg's head snapped up just in time to catch a handful of dark eyes and leering grins, before her mother's voice rang out, "Perhaps some of you have not enough work to do? I can find things that need mending!" She spoke with her hands on her hips, head tilted up to the flies, backing across the stage. The men above scattered, but their stifled, snorting laughter carried. Madame Giry turned and gave her daughter a pointed, reproachful look; Meg looked away, still panting softly from her sudden spurt of exertion. She slipped down off the side of the stage between the orchestra pit and the stairs, just as the violas began the same fragment of accompaniment over again. Meg sat on the stairs, pulling at a fraying thread near the ankle of her stocking, and wished idly for the bottle of water that sat on the other side of the stage.

Voices approached from the hall; the managers she recognized, and someone else. The third voice was naggingly familiar, though she couldn't place it – a man's voice, young, cultured. They seemed to be arguing, though Meg could not quite make out their words. She strained to hear, trying to filter out the auditory flotsam and jetsam of the rehearsals behind her. Firmin and Andre were equal parts agitated yet obsequious; as this seemed to be their perpetual state of being, it told Meg nothing. The third, still-unidentified voice was insistent – very sure of himself. She could almost make out words now . . something about . . .

" . . more active interest in the daily -"

"Marguerite!" Meg leapt to her feet, whirling around to find her mother standing above her on the edge of the stage, looking impatient. The other dancers were already arrayed behind her; Meg hadn't even heard her call them back. "Perhaps you feel you need no practice?" Madame Giry asked sharply.

"No, Mama," Meg responded, cringing and flying to her place – gracefully, with proper posture and her hands held just so. She hurriedly positioned herself to match the other girls; her mother nodded approval of her form, though she still scowled. Meg kept her face carefully blank, as it came into her mind who that third voice had been – their patron, who was also Christine's young man, the Vicomte de Chagny.

* * *

"You wished to see me, Monsieurs?" Christine asked tentatively, stepping into the managers' office. They stood together behind a desk, whispering animatedly. Andre glanced up as she entered, and favored her with an ingratiating smile. 

"Ah, yes, Miss Daae! Please, have a seat." He gestured to the plush chair in front of the desk with a flourish that was almost a bow; his business partner gave him an incredulous look.

"Yes, sit down," Firmin agreed, in a far less cordial tone.

Christine sat, very carefully, just on the edge of the chair. Her eyes darted between the two men.

"Now, Miss Daae," Andre began, clasping his hands and leaning across the desk, his head inclined towards her. He seemed to be trying very hard to appear paternal and benign; it made Christine nervous. "We have a rather – ah – _delicate _situation, that we thought perhaps you -"

"Oh, for the love of God," Firmin exclaimed, rolling his eyes. Andre frowned at him. "What we have is our patron insisting on climbing into the flies like a stagehand – the man wants to take a more _active interest_ in the theatre! A more active interest! I begin to think there's no one who _doesn't _believe himself entitled to a say in the running of this Opera!"

"We're concerned for his safety," Andre interjected placatingly.

"We're concerned that the Vicomte de Chagny is going to break his interfering neck while on our premises," Firmin said bluntly. "Miss Daae, forgive me, but I must speak plainly. In the two days – two days! – we have spent as owners of this theatre, we've had nothing but misfortune, and all of it seems to center around you and your lovers."

"My – my -" Christine stammered, shocked into incoherence. There was a sudden weightless sensation in her gut, and her face felt as thought it might just burst into flames.

"No one here is making any judgment," Andre hurried to reassure her.

"Our concerns are purely practical," Firmin agreed. Christine just gaped; he sighed impatiently. "A little scandal is good for business, Mademoiselle, but things have gone entirely too far."

"I never meant to cause any scandal," Christine finally managed in a small, choked voice.

"Of course you didn't," Andre agreed. "It's this -" he made a gesture of frustrated disgust. "- this _ghost_!"

"Who is no ghost," Firmin interjected.

"Clearly," Andre agreed. "What use would a ghost have for money? Or for you?"

"I – I don't -" Christine stuttered, her face draining from red to white. The emptiness in the pit of her stomach had turned cold. _Oh good God, they know he's only a man and they think he's doing all this because he's my lover. They're going to turn me out onto the street. _

"Please, Miss Daae, there's no need to play at modesty with us," Firmin cut her off irritably. "We are men of the world."

"Your ambition is admirable, really," Andre offered, though he sounded a little strained, and his genial face was flushed. "Very clever, to ingratiate yourself to this 'phantom' fellow. Quite the strategic move."

Christine huddled further back into her chair, wishing fervently that she could just crawl away and die of shame. That not one word of it was true hardly mattered.

"But then there is the Vicomte," Firmin interjected.

"We aren't judging," Andre repeated hastily; the more he said it, the dirtier Christine felt.

"Your 'ghost' is a jealous sort, obviously," Firmin pressed on relentlessly. "And the Vicomte is -"

"Attentive," Andre suggested.

"Obsessed," Firmin concluded. "First he demands that we account for your whereabouts, which we could not do, and then he shows up to inspect the theatre himself. I will not believe for one moment that it is a dead stagehand that concerns him. It's no good, Miss Daae, anyone can see that."

_They think I am entertaining two lovers, _Christine thought numbly. _For the sake of ambition. Good God, they think I'm a whore. _She could not quite wrap her brain around the concept at first, and was simply stunned by the grotesque absurdity of it. Then the room went quiet, both men watching her and clearly expecting a response, and a cool, traitorous voice began to whisper at the back of her mind. _What else are they to think?_ asked that voice. _Raoul was in your dressing room, unchaperoned – and then you disappeared overnight – you dragged Raoul up to the roof, alone - _

_- my God, is this what everyone thinks of me? Is that what fills the theatre? They aren't coming to hear me sing at all – they're coming to gawk at the brazen whore who keeps a Vicomte dangling while she beds some madman, some unholy specter, and then dares show her face on the stage. _

"What would you have me do?" Christine asked, very quietly, not bothering to protest her innocence.

"Far be it from us to tell a lady -" Andre fell into a fit of coughing "- how to manage her affairs," Firmin concluded, and shot Andre an unamused glare. "We are interested only in the results, Mademoiselle. We want no more accidents."

"Your voice is truly lovely," Andre offered placatingly, though he had to clear his throat to speak. "We _will _find you more challenging roles -"

"But we will not be put in the untenable position of accounting for your movements day and night to our dear, besotted patron – our young patron, mind you, whose parents still hold his purse-strings. I doubt very much that the Comte is as interested in ambitious chorus girls as his son seems to be," Firmin pronounced. "Nor will we give over the running of our theatre to this other ardent devotee of yours, this so-called 'ghost.' Your present role, therefore, is thus: I do not care how you accomplish it, but you will make the pair of them see reason, or we will remove their reason for directing their attention to our Opera!"

"As a last resort only," Andre amended quickly, still giving her that horridly benevolent little smile. His cheeks remained red and his eyes glittered as he watched her. "Truly, we would hate to lose such promising talent."

"I understand," Christine answered, and was amazed to hear her voice sounding so very level and calm.

* * *

After an two hours' constant practice, Meg felt that if their patron, the resident ghost, and the newly-minted shade of Joseph Buquet had all danced across the stage before her singing the aria from _Hannibal, _it was doubtful she would have even noticed. Her mother was in a truly wretched temper, and had no patience at all for the distracted stumblings of her pupils; thus, they had been repeating the same sequence of steps for the past hour at least. The orchestra seemed to be in a similar state, venturing through the same weary melody so many times that Meg found herself wanting to snap out corrections right along with M. Reyer. Or, perhaps, snatch up a viola and perform the piece herself. She had never so much as toucheda stringed instrument of any kind, but was infused with a bleary certainty that this particular set of notes had been so embedded into her brain that she could surely play it anyway. Whilst holding the position that continued to elude half the ballet. And mentally designing new costumes for a majority of the cast. Carlotta's hat _was _hideous. With her mind wandering and her eyes glazed over, responding by rote to her mother's sharp instructions, she barely heard the sudden shuffling over her head, the alarmed exclamations, or the heavy thump that followed. 

The petrified shrieks that erupted all around her immediately thereafter were somewhat harder to ignore, as was the hair-raising sensation of something plummeting to the stage within inches of her. A sudden flash of Buquet's contorted face flew before her eyes – she hadn't realized she'd remembered such detail – as the falling object hit the stage with sharp bang, like a gunshot, and the rest of the ballet corps scattered.

Meg's eyes shot instantly up to the flies, her feet rooted to the spot; it never entered her mind to flee. _He's here - _

The thing that had fallen so nearly on her head bounced, made a tinkling, broken-glass sound, rolled into the side of her foot, and then settled, ringing like a dropped coin.

The face that stared back at her from above was certainly not the phantom of the opera. Meg gaped, quite rudely, at the inelegantly sprawled Vicomte de Chagny. One foot, a good portion of his coat, and an empty watch fob all dangled over the side of the catwalk. He met her gaze for a long moment, no doubt stunned by his tumble; if the impact itself had not knocked him insensible, then Meg figured he must have been robbed of speech by the thought of how narrowly he'd avoided plummeting to the stage himself.

A small stampede of swearing, wide-eyed stagehands swarmed around him, seeming at a loss as to what to do. None dared actually lay hands on the Vicomte – who had, by that time, recovered sufficient sense to go quite red in the face - even to help him to his feet. Somewhere to the side of her, Meg was dimly aware of her mother throwing up her hands in utter disgust and storming off-stage, muttering a selection of choice words that might have made the stagehands blush.

The Vicomte's Adam's apple bob as he cleared his throat. "Hello," he called down to her, with a lopsided little grin and sounding decidedly abashed. "You're not hurt, are you?"

Something in Meg's gut did a dizzy little flip, for no reason she could name, save that it had something to do with the way his hair was falling into his eyes. "No," she answered, then glanced down at her feet. The dropped object was a very fine pocket watch; she picked it up carefully, wincing at the jangling sound it made. "It did not hit me, but I fear it's broken," she called up to him, trying to ignore the unfathomable strangeness of the situation.

He scowled, and began to push himself to his feet; a mess of callused hands in fingerless gloves were instantly flung out to help him.

"Those boards," Madame Giry shouted from the vicinity of the stairs, "are not meant to hold a dozen men!" Meg glanced sideways to see her mother standing at the top of the stairs, hands on hips and glaring furiously into the space over the stage. The orchestra were all on their feet, craning their necks for a better view of the spectacle, even M. Reyer. Meg heard many booted feet hastily retreating, above her head; when she looked back up into the flies, the Vicomte was standing, though rather unsteadily. He was attended by a single round-eyed, nervously shuffling man, who looked very much as if he would have preferred to be anywhere but where he stood.

"If you would please wait right there, for just one moment," the Vicomte called down to Meg, grinning, and then turned and asked something of his bewildered escort. Meg could not hear the words, but the poor stagehand seemed all too happy to lead his charge to more solid ground.

Meg stood and waited, looking down at the broken watch, then over at her mother; Madame Giry leveled a blatantly warning glare at her daughter. Meg flushed and returned to contemplating the gold watch; it was emblazoned with an intricate design of scrolls and swirls and oddly styled animals which she could only presume was the de Chagny crest. A few moments later, she heard brisk footsteps approaching from the wings, and then the Vicomte de Chagny was striding across the stage toward her with a rueful smile on his face.

He really was very handsome. She held the watch out to him like a talisman to ward off such thoughts, hoping he'd take it quickly and be gone.

""My thanks," he said. He took the watch, held it to his ear, and gave it an experimental little shake; it jangled and clinked obligingly, and he grimaced. The ruined timepiece disappeared into a coat-pocket, and then his attention was back on Meg, who cursed herself for lacking the sense to have slipped away while he was distracted. It would have been rude, yes, but a certain degree of rudeness could be excused as bashfulness. "And my apologies," he went on, holding out a hand, "Mademoiselle . . ?"

"Giry," she replied and, with a feeling like falling in her stomach, placed her hand in his. "Meg Giry." He bowed over her hand just as if she were a lady, barely brushing the back of it with his lips. He lingered no longer than was perfectly proper before releasing it back to her – not at all like the leering mockery of formality she'd seen from other noble young men, and which seemed to impress the other dancers so well. Those sort of men had always disgusted Meg; she reminded herself determinedly that the Vicomte de Chagny was assuredly one of their set, privileged and careless, however charming he seemed. _Better manners are no guarantee of better intentions. _

"Mademoiselle Giry," he acknowledged, smiling winningly. _Bashful _was not at all the word for how she felt, Meg decided, and pondered if there was a single word to describe the feeling of a mouse cornered by a cat. _A most beautiful cat. _

"Monsieur le Vicomte," she replied, and bobbed a wobbling curtsey, wincing as she straightened. If her mother saw that, she had hours of _pliés _to look forward to.

"You must call me Raoul," he said offhandedly, looking away from her to take in his surroundings. The stagehand who seemed to have been assigned as his keeper hovered in the wings, looking completely miserable. M. Reyer was trying to bring the orchestra back to order, flipping rapidly though the score of _Il Muto_ and calling out distracted instructions. His players obeyed slowly; Meg looked away from their many curious eyes, only to find herself the focus of her fellow dancers' avid attention, and worse yet, her mother's continued scrutiny. Madame Giry inclined her head respectfully to the Vicomte, her expression studiously blank; Meg cringed.

I know, Mama, I know – and anyway, he is Christine's if he is to be anyone's here.

"I seem to have disrupted your practice," Raoul observed. "I can only apologize again, and take my leave – but perhaps I will see you again?"

"Perhaps," Meg allowed, though for the sake of her nerves, she rather hoped not.

* * *

Christine knew she ought to seek out Raoul while he was there, but couldn't fathom what she could possibly say to him; just the thought of facing him with the echoes of the managers' words in her mind made her face burn. If she told him directly what they'd said, he'd surely become indignant on her behalf, which would accomplish less than nothing. If he confronted Firmin and Andre, it would only appear to confirm their insinuations. 

_They insinuated nothing – it was all said quite plainly. _She felt light-headed and ill at the memory. It seemed unreal that she'd sat placidly in her chair through the entire horrible conversation, and she could only attribute her surreal calm to the accumulation of too many shocks in too short a time, this being very much the least of them. She was not a child, she knew what the rest of society thought of dancers – she even knew that some of them earned it. But _she _did not, and she'd never imagined being accused so _calmly,_ with such bland certainty, in the middle of the day, in an ordinary office with sun coming in the windows, as if it was nothing, as if they didn't expect her to care at all that they thought _– they thought_ –

And if I cannot put things right, they will put me out. I will have nowhere to go, and only a vile reputation to recommend me.

She found herself in the chapel with no clear recollection of walking there. Her hands shook badly as she lit a candle before her father's portrait. _Please don't be ashamed of me, Papa – I don't know how everything has gotten so tangled. _Christine knelt, and tried to clear her thoughts and pray.

She could not stop remembering the look on M. Andre's face, both embarrassed and avidly attentive, those two spots of high color on his cheeks.

"Angel?" she whispered tentatively; her voice wobbled, and she realized she was very close to tears. _Oh, you mustn't. If sweet, gentle Raoul would be angry, what would your angel be? Do you want more blood on your hands? Another murder on his soul, for your sake? _"Angel, are you there?" she pleaded anyway.

_I will say nothing of it – of any of it. Maybe I shouldn't be able to push it all aside, but I don't care, I just need to hear his voice._

"Angel?"

For the first time in nearly ten years, there was no answer.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** . . putting the notes at the end, for this chapter . . yes, there will be Erik in the next chapter, which will be considerably darker/angstier, closer to the tone of the first chapter. Meg and Raoul will get their own angst and drama, but I did need to introduce them first. Oh, and re: Madame Giry's first name - I've searched for anything resembling canon, and could find nothing (somebody please correct me if I missed something), though I discovered we do have a name for Meg's father. 'Antoinette' seems to be a fanon favorite for her mother, so I'm going with it. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's Notes:** This chapter is much, much longer than I really meant it to be, but I can't think of where to split it. There are also some potentially squicky mental health issues and hurt/comfort-ish themes; consider yourselves warned (though, what the heck are you finding to read in this fandom if that kind of thing bothers you?)

A few things re: the canon on which this is based – as previously stated, this is a movie-based fic.

Re: Erik's past - in the movie, Madame Giry rescued Erik from the traveling carnival somewhere around 20-25 years ago, and he's been living under the Opera ever since. Thus, he's never been to Persia, and he did not assist in the construction of the Opera. I plan on expanding on that a bit, but for now, that's it. This makes the assortment of underground structures all a little inexplicable – I'm going on the theory that the Opera sits over a system of caves, and that he's added to them and adapted them to his purposes. Yes, this would have made rather a lot of noise and required rather a lot of work – but, he's had nothing else to do for 20-25 years, and hey, the place is supposedly "haunted", right?

This also makes Buquet only the 2nd person he's ever killed, which I think marks the occasion as somewhat more life-altering and traumatic than if Buquet were, say, the 243rd person he'd killed, and he'd spent years as a professional assassin (I'm unsure if that's Leroux or Kay, but I know I've seen it in several fics.) So, I hope y'all won't mind that my vision of Erik here is more 'unhinged and having a serious episode of PTSD' than 'debonair and sexy'.

Re: Erik's face – do me a favor, and go to www (dot) mcheathers (dot) com (slash) gbMakingPOTO(underscore)2 (dot) htm. (Sorry for the atrociously mangled web address, but the site would just eat a link .. .) Check out the 7th picture down. Then check out the 8th picture down. Note how in picture 8, he's considerably less deformed than in picture 7, particularly about the nose, mouth, and eye. I'm not sure if it's a different prosthetic entirely (I think the nose must be, at least) or what, or why they decided to back off on his appearance – maybe the scarier looking pieces inhibited speech too much or gave the actor a rash or something, I dunno – but I think his picture-7 appearance (well, plus hair) would have fit a great deal better with the story. I know this has been criticized before, I'm saying nothing new, but seriously, I've seen someone with a 3rd degree sunburn who looked scarier than he did in the final version of the movie. So, for purposes of this fic . . keep picture 7 there in mind. That's how I'm imagining him.

Re: names for OCs/characters without canon names – I have no idea if there is or ever was a Baron de Laurent; if so, I apologize profusely to him / his ancestors. I just picked a random French-sounding name. And I think I mentioned randomly deciding to go with the fanon-ish "Antoinette" for Madame Giry's first name, in last chapter.

Anyway, on to the fic . . .

* * *

"Hurry, hurry, hurry!" someone yelped as Meg slipped into the dormitory after the final performance of _Il Muto. _The girl's impatient squeaking was shrill enough to cut through the babble of general excitement, which was only slight less deafening inside the dorm as compared to out. Meg glanced over at the source of this exclamation, and saw Colleen - a pretty blonde dancer, a year younger than Meg - in her under-things, bracing herself on the end of the bed opposite Meg's while another girl tugged her corset tight enough to make breathing rather improbable. The girl with that unenviable task – Colleen tended towards curvaceous – was Claudette, younger still and pathetically eager to please anyone who would pay her the slightest attention. 

Meg slipped past them as unobtrusively as possible; Colleen was the girl she's thoughtlessly scolded, some months back, about her wealthy lover.

"Mustn't keep the illustrious Baron de Laurent waiting," Regine teased, lounging on the next bed and still in her costume. A red-haired girl flew past them with her arms full of mismatched bottles, and Regine gave a delighted cry, snatching one. The redhead allowed it, giggling, then whirled around to face Meg; she was new, and Meg couldn't remember her name. _Brigit, maybe? _

"You want?" she asked in a heavy accent, grinning and offering Meg a bottle. Meg shook her head; the girl shrugged, and moved on.

"You see, the hell with your Baron," Regine opined. "Find me a man with keys to the kitchens, and I'll be a happy woman."

"Where are my stockings?" Colleen demanded in a shrill, panicked whine.

"You're wearing stockings," Claudette pointed out, sitting on the end of the bed and tucking her own bare feet up under her shift. She'd shed her costume, but her face was still painted, and she watched her friend's antics with wide, worshipful eyes.

Meg untied her shoes and stowed them under her bed, idly massaging her stiff toes as her gaze drifted over the room, searching.

"Not _these," _Colleen wailed. "My _good _ones!" The redhaired girl with her bottles had reached the other end of the dormitory; a cheer went up. Meg craned her neck, looking past dozens of bodies in various states of undress, hoping to find a particular familiar head amidst the rest. Christine's bed was near to Meg's, but in the aftermath of a show, she often found herself shuffled elsewhere to make room for some other girl's tipsy, giggling cadre of friends. Seeing as there were several such companies already forming around the red-head's purloined bottles, Meg figured Christine had probably ensconced herself in some quiet corner, if she hadn't fled the dorm entirely.

"Where did I put them?" Colleen was whimpering. "They were here this afternoon, I'm sure they were!"

"I don't see how it really matters," Regine suggested. "Unless he likes you to leave them on? Oh, does he?"

"Did you tuck them under the mattress?" Claudette suggested, while Colleen turned scarlet, pointedly ignored Regine's impertinent questions, and crawled halfway under her bed in search of her missing stockings. Meg got to her feet, standing on the bed, to take a better survey of the room.

"Oh, he _does_, doesn't he?" Regine pressed, grinning, before taking another long swallow from her bottle.

"Don't you need to go change?" Claudette sniped, though her voice wavered uncertainly.

"To the end," called out a voice – Meg thought it might be Colette – from the far corner that had just acquired libation, "of that unnatural disaster!" A giggling cacophony of voices joined in the toast, and a scattering of bottles were raised overhead.

"This is much more interesting," Regine brushed Claudette's timorous objections aside, apparently unoffended. She sat up, swung her legs over the side of the bed, and gave Colleen – or rather, Colleen's backside, where it protruded from under the cot – her rapt attention. "Justine – you won't know her, she left before you came, married a fishmonger of all things – she said that noblemen are all perverted, and she would have known. She said that having to be so polite all the time in public turns their brains, and once you have them alone -"

"Jaques is not perverted," Colleen's muffled voice objected. "He's taking me to supper, somewhere very nice, he said, and I just want to look – ah!" she concluded, in a triumphant tone, and began to wriggle back out from under the bed.

"To no more powdered wigs!" someone shouted from the back of the room; more cheering, and the clinking of bottles. "To no more rehearsals of Act 5!" someone else suggested; this met with even more heart-felt approval. Meg added her own silent agreement – the dance from Act 5 _was _dreadful, a technical nightmare and completely uninspired – and then frowned; she didn't see Christine anywhere.

"Oh!" Colleen suddenly cried out, sounding rather as if she'd been stabbed; Meg dropped down to sit on her bed and glanced sideways at the other girl. Colleen's her thumb was protruding through the end of a very fine, lacey stocking. Regine snorted in amusement.

"It's just the toe," Claudette rushed to placate her friend. She was up on her knees on the end of the bed, hovering over Colleen's shoulder and clasping her hands. "It's not so bad. He'll never notice, and we really should get you into your dress."

"Of course he'll notice!" Colleen wailed. "It's no good at _all _now, they'll look like someone's _cast-offs_, and I saved for these -"

"He didn't give them to you?" Regine asked, tipped her bottle back, and then frowned at it in disappointment. Meg could only guess that it had run dry; she bent over the end of her own bed to pull a simple day-dress in blue out of her trunk. It smelled rather dusty; most of her days were spent dancing and it was too plain for church, so it saw little use. It seemed rather a waste to don it now, but Meg didn't want to slip past Colleen's Baron de Laurent – who would no doubt be waiting at the door – in either her costume's undergarments or her nightgown, and she did very much want to seek out Christine, who had been missing too much in recent days.

"What's the point of a rich lover if he doesn't pay for your stockings?" Regine sighed, setting the bottle on the floor and flopping back onto her bed. Colleen looked to be in danger of crying.

"You'll just have to borrow someone else's," Claudette ventured, rather desperately. "I'm sure someone else -"

"You can't have mine, you'll stretch them," Regine was quick to interject.

"That's because you're scrawny as a twig," Colleen retorted nastily, in a tearful voice, as Meg pulled her dress over her head. She heard Regine sigh, and then a bed creaking; when she wriggled the garment into place and could once more see, Regine's bed was empty.

"Don't mind her," Claudette tried to reassure Colleen.

"I can't get upset," whimpered a very upset-sounding Colleen. "I'll be blotchy."

Meg resisted the urge to roll her eyes, and instead twisted her arms around herself, contorting to try to reach the buttons that ran up the back of her dress. The skirt was going to look rather ridiculous over the abbreviated petticoat she'd worn for _Il Muto, _but she would at least be decently covered and plain, unlikely to attract attention.

"Meg!" Claudette suddenly cried out; Meg's head shot up warily. "You're of a size," she pronounced hopefully, glancing between Meg and Colleen, who was scowling. "You must have a pair of good stockings."

"Don't ask her," Colleen snapped. "Meg doesn't _approve._"

Claudette looked equal parts confused and desperate, giving Meg a terribly pleading stare.

"Of course you can borrow my stockings," Meg replied, with a twinge of regret; she'd likely never see them again, and would then have to explain to Mama where they'd gone, but that all seemed a small price for a little peace. "They're not as fine as yours, but -" she leaned forward to rummage through her trunk, and then produced the garments in question. " – will they do?"

"They're lovely!" Claudette exclaimed instantly. "Aren't they lovely, Colleen?"

"Thank you," Colleen said simply, still eyeing Meg with suspicion.

"I hope you have a good time at dinner," Meg ventured; it sounded terribly stilted and insincere to her ears, but Colleen gave her a tentative grin in response. Meg returned her smile, though she was afraid it looked tight and forced, and fled the room.

* * *

Antoinette Giry almost did not hear the soft knock on her door over the noise of the celebration outside; when she did discern it, she was tempted to ignore it. It was late, she'd taken her hair down, and the majority of the revelers still awake had reached a state of sufficient inebriation that they'd never remember if she was rude to them or not. 

The knock came again, quick and a little louder, and she sighed. It would not be the one person she wished to see, the one person who had occupied her troubled thoughts for days, because Erik would not knock. It could, however, be one of her girls.

If one of her girls had gotten herself so sick on drink that they had to come running for help, there would be dire consequences – in the morning, though, not now. Antoinette demanded their absolute respect unflinchingly, but she never wanted them to fear her more than they trusted her, and that meant there could be no harsh words now. She pushed herself to her feet, squared her shoulders, and cracked open her door.

When she saw the face on the other side, she swung the door wide in frank shock. Christine Daae lowered a small, white fist quickly to her side; she'd been poised to knock again. Christine did not drink – truth be told, the girl did not celebrate in any fashion – and was not well tolerated by those girls who did. Her face looked a little red from scrubbing, free of stage make-up, but pale about the mouth and dark at the eyes.

"Child, what is it?" Antoinette asked in genuine concern, ushering the young girl inside. Christine complied with an unaccustomed hesitancy to her steps, moving to the middle of the small room and twisting her hands fretfully while Antoinette shut the door.

"There was no rose," Christine blurted out instantly, as though she'd been struggling to keep the words in. "Not last night or the night before either, and I'm afraid -"

"No, no, no," Antoinette murmured soothing, taking hold of the young girl's trembling shoulders and guiding her to sit on the bed. "You mustn't think you've done anything wrong, child. You sang beautifully. He cannot be displeased."

"I'm not worried that he's displeased," Christine insisted, her voice a soft wail. "It's just – he hasn't – I haven't heard him at all, not since -" She stopped, looking very caught, and Antoinette sighed wearily.

"Since Buquet," Antoinette supplied for her, forcing her face into an expression of unflappable calm despite the churning of her insides. "Of course I know he was responsible, dear."

"Oh," Christine said in a small voice, and seemed to shrink into herself, shoulders rounding. "Have you -" Christine stopped, her eyes flitting from Antoinette's face to the floor. She was still shaking. Antoinette turned away in search of her shawl.

"Have you always known what he was?"

Antoinette stopped with her back still to Christine, her hands clenching in the fabric of the shawl. So many possible answers to that question – _yes, of course I have; _truth, in a way. And also, _no, not until Buquet did I realize what he could do. _But then, if she said, _I have worried, I have feared, for a very long time, _that would not be a lie either, and those were only the answers to one interpretation of the question, the one that had haunted Antoinette's thoughts since the opening night of _Il Muto. _

_Did you know he was capable of murder?_

_Yes, yes I did. I knew that when I brought him here. I knew that when I taught my girls to mind their tongues; I told myself I just didn't like to hear those macabre stories, that it couldn't be good for him to hear them whispering of him as a monster, but I knew. _

_I knew when I gave you into his care. _

Antoinette turned back with the shawl tangled about her hands, and met Christine's wide, pleading eyes unflinchingly. _I knew when I heard you speak of your angel. _"And what is that?" Antoinette forced herself to ask calmly; it would be unwise to presume that Christine's thoughts had tread the same path her own guilty conscience had taken. She'd learned long ago that the girl's view of things could be unpredictable, and her peace of mind fragile; it was better to understand precisely what she was asking before venturing an answer that might do more harm than good.

"I know that he's . . he's the ghost," Christine offered, cringing all the while. "And y-you – you know the ghost," she pressed on, still meeting Antoinette's gaze unblinkingly; she made Antoinette think of a cornered cat, all round eyes, too afraid to look away. "He leaves you notes, for the managers, and – and the sketches for the set designers and the costumers, and his criticisms of the orchestra, and – and all those horrid things he's always saying of Carlotta and the suggestions that Piangi always rips up and –" her voice was rising in both pitch and volume, the words coming faster and faster. Antoinette slung the shawl over her elbow and hurried to her, crouching down on the floor in front of the nigh-hysterical girl and cupping her chin in both hands.

"- and you know him, you'd know if -" Christine babbled frantically.

"Hush," Antoinette ordered, in the tone of inarguable authority that all of her girls recognized; Christine hushed, instantly, blinking. "Shh now," Antoinette repeated more softly, and stroked Christine's hair back from her face. It was greasy and brittle with the pomade they'd used to dress it for the stage, and a spattering of white powder remained around her ears. "Yes, I knew your angel was my ghost," she confessed quietly. "Christine, I swear to you, our deceptions were kindly meant. I am sorry if I've hurt you, dearest, I truly am."

Christine made no acknowledgement of the apology, pressing on as if she'd not even heard it. "But he's not a ghost," she insisted, voice still tight with fear, "any more than he is an angel. He's just a human man, a mortal man."

A horrible shiver of a thought slid into Antoinette's mind – just how much _humanity _had Erik shown this child? What had he demanded of her? "If you wish him to trouble you no more, I will see to it," Antoinette told her, in a tone of quiet steel. How exactly she would manage that, she had no idea, but it was her burden and she would find a way.

"No!" Christine exclaimed, looking stricken. "No, please, I do – I want very much to see him again!"

Antoinette sat back on her heels, surprised both by the girl's unexpected reaction and by the vehemence of it. "Child," she began carefully, "Dearest – you understand, don't you, that he's -" she searched for the right word, mindful of the frailty of this girl who believed in angels sent to Earth. "- troubled?" she finally concluded. Though she felt vaguely traitorous for the comparison, she gave silent thanks that her Meg was made of sterner stuff.

"I'm – I'm afraid -" Christine began, but couldn't seem to finish the thought.

"You're perfectly safe now," Antoinette reassured her.

"No, that's not it!" Christine retorted, with a note of frustrated impatience that made Antoinette's brows climb towards her hair. "I'm afraid that – he's never failed to answer me before, not for so long. Madame, he – he wouldn't do himself any harm, would he?"

Antoinette Giry blinked; if the girl had slapped her, she didn't think she could have been more astonished. It was a thought that had entered her own mind more than once in the past three days, but she had never expected Christine to think such a thing. After the sudden revelation of her 'angel's humanity, and then of his capacity for violence, Antoinette had feared she might find the girl sitting in some corner, chatting pleasantly to creatures who were not there – angels and goblins and elves. It had happened, before, when Christine first came to the Opera.

This frantic concern for him, Antoinette thought, was still madness, but of a new and unexpected sort.

"You must take me to him," Christine suddenly blurted out, snatching the older woman's hands up so quickly and with such unexpected strength that Antoinette flinched. Christine didn't seem to notice. "Please – I tried to go myself but the mirror wouldn't open." Antoinette said a silent prayer of thanks to almighty God for that small favor. "I know he's not the angel he pretended to be -" This was said in a tone of such determined acceptance that it made her wonder whether Christine really believed her own words. "- and I know that ought to make me want no more to do with him, but it just doesn't, I can't tell you why but it doesn't, and I can't bear to be so suddenly, completely without him," Christine concluded pitifully. "I need to speak to him, at least once more - I _must _speak to him - please - I can't bear for him to be just – just gone."

She sounded more like a drunkard missing his bottle than anything else.

"Do you need him anymore, child?" Antoinette asked carefully. "No, listen to me," she commanded, when Christine began shaking her head in instant protest of this line of thought. "He is a troubled man. A dangerous man. He's taught you well, yes, and you owe him your gratitude for that, but now the world has heard your voice, and I think you will have no trouble finding future roles. It has changed everything – much more, I think, than either of you wished."

"But -"

"He has become intemperate where you are concerned," Antoinette said bluntly. "He wished to give you the world, but not to share you with it. It is not your fault – never think it your fault – but perhaps it is good if he stays away, good for both of you. I will visit him and tell you how he fares, if you wish. I would have sought him out soon enough anyhow." She tried to sound completely confident that she would find him healthy and whole, while at the back of her mind she began to consider what she would tell Christine if she found his corpse.

"I must speak to him," Christine insisted in a defeated whisper. "He has been my friend -"

"Am I not your friend?" Antoinette interrupted gently, and settled her shawl about Christine's hunched and shivering shoulders. "And Meg? You are not alone without him, child."

"Yes," Christine agreed, rather miserably. "Yes, of course you are my friends." She went silent, pulling the corners of the shawl into her lap and twisting them about her fingers, eyes downcast. She remained quiet and seemed resigned. Antoinette gave a small, relieved sigh and moved to stand, but before she could Christine looked up.

"It doesn't matter, though," Christine said softly. "Oh, that sounds terrible, I'm sorry - I am so very grateful for your friendship - and I know what you're telling me is very sensible, but - my angel -" she stopped herself and winced, but then raised her chin in tremulous defiance. "I _am _alone without him," she pronounced shakily. "I've been so alone without him, these last three days, it's seemed like so much longer, and -" She stopped, swallowing and visibly steeling herself. " – and the last time I spoke to him was just after . . . after Buquet, and he was so _broken,_ and I can't stop thinking that if something happened to him now, when he's killed a man, and he hasn't – well, he confessed to me, I suppose -" Her words were beginning to run together again. "- but I don't know if that's good enough! If something happened to him now I wouldn't know -"

"Hush, child. That is enough of that," Antoinette interrupted, gently but sternly. "It is not your place to judge his soul." _Though it is doubtful he would find more mercy anywhere._

"He killed a man," Christine repeated, voice wavering and lost.

"And yet you wish to be taken to him," Antoinette reminded her in a weary, dubious tone.

"Yes," Christine said, almost inaudibly. "Please."

* * *

"Mademoiselle -" 

The man's hand stopped just short of taking Meg's, and retreated hastily as soon as he had her attention. He was young and finely dressed; with a generous mouth and rather too much nose, he hovered somewhere between handsome and absurd. His mannerisms did nothing to help him in this regard; he was twitchy, shrinking away from the raucous crowd and licking his lips as if he was either very nervous or a little nauseous.

"Monsieur?" Meg replied politely, and then had to duck out of the way of a carpenter and a kitchen maid dancing drunkenly down the hallway. Applause and cheers followed them, feet stomping and hands clapping. The nervous gentleman – almost certainly Colleen's Baron – followed her into the meager shelter of the dormitory doorway. The space they vacated was immediately taken by other bodies; performers in and out of costume bumped elbows with seamstresses, and carpenters shared bottles with painters. All stood with their backs to the walls, shelves, doors, and Meg; what little open space there was in the center had turn quickly into a gaudy, garish caricature of a ballroom, full of whirling forms more exuberant than graceful. The laughter that echoed up through the scaffolding toward the roof was genuine enough, though; liqueur in abundant supply, Meg thought, tended to bring good cheer even to such an enclave of artistic temperaments.

Interspersed here and there through the crowd was a fine suit-jacket, much too tidy to belong to any member of the orchestra or set designer; the arms of those fine coats were invariably twined with the arms of young and pretty dancers. _Like flowers pinned to their lapels, _Meg thought sourly, and fought not to scowl at her twitchy companion. They were well and truly trapped there, for the moment, the crowd in front of them making an exit completely impossible.

"I w-was wondering," began the man Meg presumed was the Baron de Laurent, though he had yet to introduce himself, "I'm w-waiting for someone -"

"She should be out presently," Meg answered him.

"W-what?" It was difficult to be heard through the general chaos.

"She will be out in a moment! She's changing!" Meg shouted back. Someone a few stories up began to play a violin, the music drifting down from over their heads, sharp and pure. It was a folk song of some sort, the melody uncomplicated and the lyrics the crowd began to sing rather ribald, but the sound of the violin itself was still quite beautiful. Meg wondered if that might be Colette's beau playing; she always claimed he was truly gifted, but then, her judgment was not unbiased.

The Baron shook his head in persistent confusion, opened his mouth to repeat his question, and then paused, listening. Meg watched and tried not to be maliciously amused as the lyrics being sung around them registered in his mind, and he flushed deeply red.

_But here he is to collect pretty Colleen, who expects him to be in a position to notice a hole in the toe of her stocking, at some point this night._

To the right of them, Meg heard the singing interrupted here and there by annoyed utterances, some of them none too polite. She had to press tighter in against the door to avoid having her feet trampled by the shifting of the crowd. The violinist apparently noted the disorder in his chorus and ceased with that tune; for a moment there was only grumbling and laughter, and amidst this, Meg heard a familiar, genteel voice repeatedly begging pardon as the owner of that voice pushed his way through the crowd. The violin began again, joined this time by a clarinet and what she thought might be a viola. It was a faster tune this time, and apparently wordless. She heard the rapid stomp of drunken dancing resume, and then the Vicomte de Chagny staggered his way into view between a stagehand and a wig-maker.

"Mademoiselle Giry," he greeted her cheerfully, stumbling to an awkward halt rather closer to her person that decorum would have dictated, but the crowd would give him no more space. His eyes fell on her companion, and he nodded in recognition. "Laurent," he greeted the man, confirming Meg's guess as to his identity.

"Chagny," Laurent greeted the Vicomte, swallowing and obviously trying to control his stuttering. His shoulders straightened, though his cheeks remained red, and he made an attempt to wriggle a hand up between them to shake. Raoul made a similar effort, both of them contorting ridiculously in the effort not to jostle Meg with their elbows. Meg, for her part, just pressed as tightly to the door as she could whilst this bit of masculine ritual played out.

"It's a da – er," Raoul began, then glanced sideways at Meg. "That is, it's – quite something in here, eh?" he enquired loudly of Laurent, giving the fellow nobleman a conspiratorial grin. "And I've misplaced my dinner companion!" He sounded almost cheerful about it, as though braving these back-stage environs were quite the adventure; Meg felt her opinion of the Vicomte de Chagny slipping.

The Baron de Laurent, for his part, stammered unintelligibly, and at Meg's back, the door opened. There was no time and no room to get out of its way; the door smacked into the right side of her, from skull to hip, and sent her stumbling straight into Raoul. He caught her with as much propriety as was possible, she had to concede; his hands landed on her shoulders, and stayed there just long enough to see that she'd regained her feet. Meg felt her face going scarlet, and tried to back away, but ran into another body. A wordless exclamation of irritation in a feminine voice followed this collision; Meg turned to find Colleen standing where she had so recently been, wearing a dress of peacock green that looked to be the very height of fashion, though it fit a little awkwardly, and Meg could see that its stitching was uneven in places.

The Baron de Laurent hurriedly shuffled half a pace to her side, and Colleen beamed up at him. Her lips were painted very red, nearly as bright as the Baron's cheeks as his left hand found her waist and his right brought her fingers to his lips. She giggled delightedly; Meg fought the urge to scowl, and couldn't help by remember Regine's assertions about gentlemen. The Baron smiled, despite the redness of his face; he looked rather as if he had some sort of virulent fever, in Meg's opinion. Then he glanced up at Raoul.

"W-would you c-c-are to j-join us?" he ventured, shouting.

Colleen stiffened, shooting Meg a venomous glare, and then turning her gaze speculatively on Meg's male companion; her expression changed completely, going from shocked to confused to reluctantly calculating in the space of two breaths. Her eyes darted back to Meg, and she looked momentarily like she'd bitten something sour, but then she smiled up at Raoul. "Yes, please," she added; Meg knew she was trying to be simultaneously demure and also loud enough to be heard, but it didn't work very well at all, and she just sounded rather squeaky and strange.

Raoul, thankfully, shook his head. Meg had been nearly certain he would decline, as it would have been simply too much of a farce for the pair of them – a Vicomte, and her in her dusty day-dress with a tutu underneath – to accompany this gaudy pair to dinner. There had been just a sliver, just a moment, though, of fear that he might find it funny.

"I'm still seeking -" The crowd suddenly cheered, drowning out the rest of his words. Raoul gave a rueful grin and shrugged, then made a shooing motion at the pair of them. "Enjoy yourselves!" he shouted; Colleen smiled widely, looking distinctly relieved, and darted instantly into the crowd; she had no problem whatsoever slipping her way between closely pressed bodies. The Baron de Laurent made a stilted attempt to nod at the Vicomte before he was dragged along, his hand in Colleen's, still looking the very picture of mortification.

"I'm looking for Christine," Raoul shouted. "She wasn't in her dressing room. Is she - ?" He gestured at the dorm.

If Christine had plans to sup with the Vicomte, Meg knew nothing of them – but, she considered, he was Christine's childhood friend, and Christine had never spoken ill of him.

Meg glanced briefly into the crowd in the direction that Colleen and her Baron had gone, feeling torn – surely it was not like that, between Christine and Raoul? She couldn't imagine it; Christine hardly seemed to live in the world at all, some days, and she was so devout. Still – her eyes went back to the Vicomte's guileless, hopeful face – how else could it be, between a nobleman and a dancer? Christine was so very naïve – Meg considered that perhaps it fell to her, the more worldly of the two, to guard Christine from dangers she likely did not understand. The Vicomte was charming and handsome, but that didn't make his intentions honorable.

Yet, she could hardly hope to ascertain the nature of his intentions standing pressed to a doorway in the middle of what was rapidly becoming a drunken bacchanal, and she had even less hope of getting rid of him. The crowd would part for a Vicomte much more readily than it would for herself; also, he had done her the unintentional favor of letting her know Christine was not at her dressing room, saving Meg a fruitless struggle there and back again. She could think of only one other place Christine was likely to be – only one other place known to man, above the ground, but she pushed that thought quickly away – and anyway, Meg reasoned, she would be there herself as chaperone. She could see Christine and her Vicomte together, and make a better judgment as to whether it was her sisterly duty to discourage the attachment.

"She is likely in the chapel," Meg replied; someone out on the dance floor gave a shrill scream, half scandalized and half delighted. Meg flushed.

Raoul shook his head and gestured at the crowd, indicating he'd not heard.

"She's likely -" Meg began again, only to be cut off by a building crescendo of stomping feet and more ear-piercing shrieks. Exasperated, she gave up and grabbed his hand, tugging him in the direction that the tiny church lay. He looked momentarily surprised at this boldness, but then grinned, winked, and insinuated himself in front of her. "Excuse me!" he called out, in the most haughtily aristocratic tone Meg had ever heard him use, and began to push his way forward. The people they passed scowled, and Meg caught a few rude gestures at their backs, but they were given room to pass.

* * *

"It was not like this," Christine murmured. 

"Hrmm?" Madame Giry cast a questioning look back over her shoulder, still walking.

"It – it wasn't -" Christine stepped over a patch of something damp and foul-smelling, trying not to breath too deeply. She could hear things scurrying in the walls.

"This will not be the same path you took. He will not have left the boat for our use, so we must skirt the lake," Madame Giry returned in a clipped done, and then stopped and flung out a restraining arm, so abruptly that Christine stumbled into her. "Do not move." Christine froze obediently. "I believe . . ." The older woman shifted a fraction of a step forward, one foot seeking along the ground. Christine remained where she was with some difficulty, wanting to press close to the other woman's side, to stay within the meager circle of light afforded by her candle. Madame Giry's boot found an edge, and she jerked back from it, colliding again with Christine. She did not seem to mind, but rather reached out for her. "Yes, I thought so. Here, give me your hand, and step to your left – carefully, carefully -" Christine clutched Madame Giry's fingers and pressed herself tight to the wall, her skin crawling. "- two more steps, small steps, carefully – you may walk normally now," she pronounced briskly, and pulled Christine along.

"What was that?" Christine asked, her voice shaking.

"Trap door," Madame Giry responded. "He is not fond of uninvited guests."

"There were no trap doors, the way I came before," Christine murmured.

"Of course there were," Madame Giry snapped. "We are turning here, mind your head – he led you around them."

"It was not like this," Christine repeated, frightened and bewildered. "There were lights – candles – it did not smell this way."

Madame Giry stopped once more, turning to glance back at Christine with eyes that glittered in the dark. "Candles," she repeated. "When he took you from the dressing room."

"Yes," Christine said softly. "It – it was – everything glowed," she concluded quietly.

"He carried a light," Madame Giry offered. "It would have reflected strangely, where the rock is smooth, and there is water dripping. That is what you saw."

"I saw candles," Christine insisted. "On the walls – in golden sconces like arms, like the statues in the grand foyer, hundreds and hundreds of candles, it was so beautiful -" she stopped at the look on Madame Giry's face. "There aren't any candles, are there?" Christine asked in a small, frightened voice. "I – I saw them rising out of the lake. So much light . . it was so beautiful, but – but then it was also dark. How can that be?" she asked, trembling, shaking her head in denial. "I told Raoul – I told him it was dark, all dark, and . . . I think it was? I think I remember darkness -"

There were suddenly strong fingers clasping her jaw. Christine met Madame Giry's gaze with wide, wild eyes.

"You cannot do this now," Madame Giry said sternly. "Not now, not here. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Madame," Christine whispered, though she understood nothing. A stray fragment of memory unfolded in her brain; a flock of crows, hundreds of them, lifting from crowded rooftops and spiraling into the sky. She could assign neither time nor place to the memory, and knew only that her thoughts felt just like that, a mad whirl of black wings, beating inside her head. _It was beautiful – wasn't it? But then why was I afraid? _

Madame Giry sighed, and the hand that clutched Christine's chin released her and turned to cup her cheek. The older woman's face was just painted shadows and gleaming eyes, robbed of expression by the dark, but it still made Christine whisper, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'll try. I want to try."

"I know you do, dear," Madame Giry said gently.

"There can't have been lights coming up from the water," Christine said, almost inaudibly. "There can't have been. An – an angel could do something like that - a miracle. But if he is only a man -" Her voice caught. _If he is only a man, then what did I see? What was real?_

_We are all mad here – _

"He is a man who knows many clever tricks," Madame Giry suggested placatingly. She let her hand drop away from Christine's face, sighing in resignation. She took up Christine's hand and tugged her forward. "Perhaps this is one of them. He wanted badly to impress you," she said, facing away from Christine now, into the impenetrable dark of the tunnel ahead. "To give you wonders." The flame of her candle flickered, momentarily turning a sickly blue. "Come. It is not wise to tarry here."

* * *

"You don't like him," Raoul observed as they ducked into the quiet hall that approached the chapel; the chaos outside was reduced to a dim, distant roar. He sounded puzzled, and intrigued. 

"Who is that?" Meg feigned polite confusion.

"Laurent," Raoul replied. "You could scarcely look at him. Has he been unpleasant to you?" He sounded as though he could not believe such a thing; it was, Meg admitted, rather unlikely. She doubted the Baron de Laurent had the nerve to kill an insect, much less raise voice or hand to a woman.

"I have only met him this once, but he was unfailingly polite," Meg replied honestly, hurrying her steps towards the chapel; with any luck, they would find Christine. Then Meg could cease worrying, Raoul would be distracted, and this conversation would be over.

"And yet you dislike him," Raoul pressed. "You don't deny it – and yet I can't picture you as a cross sort of person." He paused. "Of course, you are an actress."

Meg turned and bristled at this, unable to help her reaction, though she knew instantly it had been unwise. He was grinning quite unabashedly. "Perhaps you are in fact quite foul-tempered and unpleasant," he suggested teasingly, brow furrowing excessively, "and only present a façade of good nature. Laurent, by being so very harmless and affable, therefore galls you to no end, and is thus your undoing. You cannot hide your spite." This shocking denouncement of her character was delivered in a stern tone, whilst he advanced on her with measured steps. He stopped just far enough away to be polite, and raised one quizzical brow. "Well, Mademoiselle? What say you?"

Meg stammered, well aware he'd not been serious at all, but still without any idea how to respond. A nervous giggle bubbled up out of her throat entirely without her consent, and he smiled broadly. "There, you are laughing," he pronounced triumphantly, and then frowned with mock severity. "Of course, I must now concede my error. A person of mean and spiteful nature could not possibly laugh so sweetly."

"You are being ridiculous, Sir," Meg objected, caught between exasperation and amusement.

"Ah, good, now you feel at liberty to criticize me," he observed; Meg's eyes rounded, her mouth opening on a hasty apology, but he waved a dismissive hand. "That, of course, was precisely my intention. As you are a friend to Christine, I would have you be at ease with me."

Meg felt privately certain that she would grow wings before she would feel at ease in the company of a Vicomte – especially this one. What she said aloud, however, was, "I think she must not be here," and she turned to frown in the direction of the chapel door. "She would have heard us if she were, and come to greet us."

"It would be like her not to hear us at all," Raoul ventured, following behind as Meg took the remaining few steps into the stone vestibule. "As I remember her, she was often lost in dreams."

"Then she is unchanged," Meg agreed, but the chapel was indeed empty. Raoul stepped inside after her, then stopped and scowled.

"Where else could she have gone?" he asked aloud, clearly frustrated. "It will be too late for supper soon."

_Into the underworld, like Persephone, _though Meg; she had heard that myth from Christine's lips. _Into the dark where my mother keeps her secrets. _

"You are frowning again," Raoul observed, and matched her expression. "You are worried for her, aren't you? Why were you seeking her, what is it you fear?" There was a sharp edge to his tone now.

"May I not simply miss her company?" Meg retorted, perhaps a little too swiftly; he was wrong, she was no actress at all in matters like these.

"Of course you may," he responded impatiently, "but I can see you are troubled, more than is reasonable if that is all -" he took a step towards her, reaching a hand out in a beseeching gesture; Meg stepped away, her back going straight. He stopped instantly.

"My apologies, Mademoiselle," he said, sounding quite sincere, "I'm upsetting you – please know that was not my intention. I've known Christine since we were both children, and I worry for her. She is so -" He paused, searching for the proper word.

"I know her as well," Meg offered in tentative truce. "I worry for her as well."

"But you will not tell me why," Raoul said, an edge creeping back into his voice, though he kept himself to a carefully decorous distance, his hands at his sides. He grimaced sourly. "I've spent the past three days all but living in this place; I've learned the operation of the mechanisms that raise and lower backdrops, how to properly mix plaster, and the terms to describe several steps of dance, but I'm no closer to understanding the workings of this – this place -" Meg had the distinct impression that he'd had another term first in mind. "- than I was a week ago! Ask any question of interest – ask about this 'ghost', particularly – and you all go mute!"

Meg simply stood where she was, silent, though his words echoed unpleasantly in her head. She realized with a pang of sympathy that his feelings nearly echoed her own; it was abruptly tempting to tell him all that she knew and suspected, to pour out her frustrations at her mother's secret comings and goings, the willful blindness of the managers, the very nature of this 'ghost' who could be both benign and vengeful. She bit her tongue and silently railed against her mother, whom she must protect. Within the small world of the theatre, Antoinette Giry was a force of nature, a person to be reckoned with; outside of that, she was merely woman in a dubious profession. Buquet's death sat heavily in Meg's thoughts, making all possibility of confiding in this unexpected compatriot, the Vicomte, entirely unthinkable. However furiously frustrated she was at being excluded from her mother's confidence, Meg understood that to speak of what little she knew was to risk her mother's very life.

It was so horridly, awfully unfair, to be forced to keep secrets she did not even understand, for a person who would not explain.

Raoul sighed, shoulders slumping. "I'm being rude. Again," he admitted, rather bitterly. "I daresay if you were not so polite, you'd like to flee this room."

"No," Meg insisted, and was surprised to find it an honest response; she felt a sudden kinship for this man in front of her. That, she knew, was very good reason indeed to flee immediately. He was Christine's, and a nobleman besides. "I did not care for the Baron de Laurent because of his association with Colleen," she blurted out, confessing the one secret that was hers to tell.

Raoul frowned. "The young woman he was with tonight?" Meg nodded. "He treats her badly?" Raoul asked, sounding disbelieving. "She seemed to dote on him."

"She does," Meg agreed. "And, he doesn't, no."

"Then what is your objection?" he asked, honestly perplexed. Some of the fellow feeling that had blossomed so suddenly between them dissipated at his naïve bewilderment, for which Meg was grateful. It was better, all around, if her feelings toward him remained cool.

"He does not intend to marry her," Meg said bluntly. Raoul frowned, and looked even more puzzled; Meg cringed, and cursed her wayward tongue. "I'm sorry, that was a dreadfully inappropriate -"

"No, I am not offended," Raoul interrupted, "but – forgive me, if I may speak plainly in return, but – she cannot expect that he will, can she?"

"No," Meg retorted, meeting his gaze in sudden anger. "But why shouldn't she? Oh, I understand that she would make a very poor Baroness, but then what right has he to enjoy -" Meg stopped herself, seeing the scandalized expression taking shape on the Vicomte's face. "- her company?" she finished rather lamely, flushing. "A young woman of the Baron's own station would expect that if he took her out and bought her gifts and praised her beauty, that he must intend marriage," Meg pressed on doggedly. "But Colleen is not to expect such a thing, while the Baron may expect her to come out with him, to accept his gifts and his compliments – and how is that fair?"

The Vicomte de Chagny resembled nothing so much as a landed fish, his mouth hanging open in frank astonishment and his brows furrowed.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Meg rushed to say, "I don't know what I'm thinking, speaking this way."

"I -" he stopped and swallowed. "I don't mind."

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that he was a very poor liar, but she managed to reign herself in. Her face was still red; what would her mother think? That most of the opinions she'd just voiced had been her mother's first, and related to a young Meg is far more explicit and unforgiving terms, was immaterial – one did not speak that way to a Vicomte, most especially not the Opera's patron.

Her mother, Meg thought, face going even more deeply red, would no doubt have a few choice words to say about her daughter being alone with a Vicomte, even in the chapel.

"You are a philosopher," the Vicomte offered, and smiled; it was stilted and strained, but not condemning.

"Hardly that," Meg demurred, studying her feet and calling herself every possible sort of fool for not minding her tongue.

"What else shall I call a person with such passionate thoughts on the rights of men? Or women," he amended hastily. "I am embarrassed that I cannot answer you; it is a subject I've never truly considered."

_You should have, _Meg thought uncharitably, _if you counted yourself a friend to Christine. These are not idle questions of philosophy for her. _

"Have you read any of the great philosophers?" he asked; the question was put forth in a tone of speculative awe, as if she had so unsettled his expectations of her that anything was now possible. A hurried glance up at his face showed that she had his rapt, delighted attention. _I amuse him – like an oddity at a fair. _"Plato, Aristotle?" he suggested.

"No," Meg replied. "I've read very little – Christine has a few books, and she reads aloud sometimes, but those are mostly fiction. I have no books of my own."

"Oh," the Vicomte responded, frowning a little. There was a pause, and then, "But – you can read?"

"Yes, I know how to read," Meg responded, rather more sharply than she intended, marshalling all her wounded dignity to give her the courage to look him in the eye. "My mother taught me; she insists that all we dancers learn." The look on his face confused her; it was faintly abashed, as it rightly should be, but there was also a touch of mischief there. He looked very much like a troublesome little boy who was plotting a prank.

"That is very wise of your mother," Raoul acknowledged politely, confusing her even further, "And speaking of your mother, perhaps I had best return you to her care; it is far too late for supper, and you've made me newly mindful of the impropriety of the two of us alone in this room." There was a definite twinkle to his eye, though also a rueful, apologetic twist to his lips.

It was entirely too endearing. _He is nothing of yours, and never can be, _Meg scolded herself.

"I trust you to remain a gentleman," Meg responded primly, offered him her arm, and let herself be escorted out of the chapel.

* * *

The first thing Christine noticed was the smell; unwashed bodies were nothing new to her, but this was overlain with something sickly, like rotting meat, a cloying odor that clung to the back of her throat and made her gag. Next came sound – a furious, manic scratching. Muttering. Paper tearing – a figure stood, the back of a white shirt stained with sweat, and walked to the wall. It was only then that Christine really registered the walls. 

"Oh, Erik," Madame Giry murmured, sounding equal parts exasperated and heartbroken.

In the antechamber that faced the lake, there were no walls anymore.

Where the walls had been, there were faces – horrible, jeering, demonically laughing faces, hundreds of them rendered in pencil and charcoal upon sheet after sheet of paper. Bits and pieces of them stood out in perfect clarity, real enough to reach out from the page – here an eye, there a gaping mouth, a pointing finger – while the rest was just wild lines. In some places the paper was ripped, or the charcoal smeared, sweaty fingerprints streaking across the images. There were splotches of red mingled with the black, dabs and splatters. Half of Christine's mind processed these details with cool, hollow detachment, while in the rest of her a scream began to build. The unevenness of the technique did nothing to mute the overwhelming realism of the ash-and-paper mob. Every line held a horrible perfection, a spark of diabolical life. Joseph Buquet's face stared out from the crowd more than once, both living and dead, features twisted with predatory malice in one image, then with a rope twisted about his neck in another – the figure in the middle of the room stumbled to the wall, pressing a new Buquet in amongst the rest – his charcoal eyes were bulging, just impatient spirals of ash - face dark, red thumbprint in the corner of the page –

Christine stumbled to the edge of the water, choking and clutching her stomach.

She heard the figure in the center of that hand-drawn hell whirl around as she plunged her hands into the lake and, not caring for its filth or cleanliness, brought her dripping hands up to her face. The water was shockingly cold, and helped to push back the bile that rose in her throat.

"Christine," he whispered; his voice sounded raw. "How – how can you be -" Footsteps started towards her, then stopped; his breath was ragged. "You brought her here." He was addressing Madame Giry now. "How could you bring her here?" It was a wounded-animal wail.

Madame Giry gave a beleaguered sigh. "You brought her here, Erik," she pointed out, "And she was quite determined to come back. Should I have let her try to make her own way?"

"Not – not now!" he exclaimed, panicked; he lurched a few steps closer, then backed away again. Christine stayed huddled at the edge of the lake, hands over her face, water dripping down her wrists and her throat. It was becoming easier to breathe; the smell was becoming less overwhelming. "She can't – she can't be here now -" He was pacing. She heard the papers on the walls rustle with his passing. "I can't – can't -"

_All those horrible faces –_

"When did you last eat?" Madame Giry asked in a low, soothing tone.

"Eat?" he parroted, as if the entire concept were foreign. The footsteps and the rustling papers paused. Madame Giry sighed again.

"You've left the mask on all this time," she observed flatly. "Days. Haven't you?"

"I -" He stopped, swallowing audibly. Christine took a deep and unsteady breath, and let her hands fall from her eyes. He stood perhaps a dozen paces away, shaking violently. His hair stood out from his head, filthy and wild. _He must have worn a wig before, _she thought inanely. _His hair is lighter than I remember it. _It was streaked with charcoal. For a moment their eyes met, but he looked away instantly, hands going up to his head. His fingers were almost entirely black, except where the oozing of ruptured blisters left trails of blood and clear fluid. There were smears of ash and blood across the mask. Behind him, the faces mocked and leered. Christine felt herself beginning to tremble, as if a chord ran between their bodies, his shudders vibrating into her gut. "I had to – they wouldn't stop -"

He turned around to face his handiwork, fingers still tangled in his hair.

"Erik, you know better," Madame Giry admonished quietly, then strode purposefully across the room and vanished into an adjoining passageway. Christine gave a startled little jerk at the older woman's abrupt departure. _Don't leave me here! _She must have made some small sound, because Erik spun back around to face her, staring pleadingly. They were momentarily alone.

Christine wobbled to her feet; Erik swallowed over and over, as if he were trying not to be sick. The silence was complete and horrible, punctuated by the mute laughter of their paper audience.

Madame Giry reappeared with a pitcher and a handful of rags. "I should have brought ointment," she muttered impatiently. "I'll have to go back for it, but we can begin, at least. Really, Erik, I thought you'd learned from the last time."

Erik looked wildly back and forth between the two women; Madame Giry set the sloshing pitcher down on the floor. "Sit down," she ordered, "before you faint with hunger, and crack your empty head. Christine, would you see if you can find anything edible in this pit?" She resolutely ignored the drawings on the walls, dipping a rag into the pitcher and then giving Erik an impatient look.

He shied away, his eyes locked on Christine's face and his features contorting in a desperate sort of horror. Madame Giry turned to look at her, then back at Erik, then let her hand drop to her side and sighed in clear exasperation. "Christine?" she enquired again. "Never mind about the food. There is a large library, through the passage just to your right, along the upper ledge there. Perhaps you'd like to go find something to read, and wait there for me?"

Christine just blinked at her in utter incomprehension, while Erik continued to watch them with all the apparent sanity of a cornered rat.

"Now, perhaps?" Madame Giry suggested, with a sharp, familiar edge to her tone.

Christine obeyed out of sheer habit, scurrying past them and up the ledge without thinking, the prospect of escape entirely too appealing. Her path took her past the darkened alcove that held the mannequin in her likeness; it brought her to a stumbling halt. It had been turned to face the wall.

"Christine!" Madame Giry snapped impatiently from behind her. "_Now, _if you please!" Despite the polite words, it was not a request. Christine did not respond, staring hard at a very fine wig; the mannequin's hair curled just a little more tightly than her own. Perhaps it was due to being kept down here in the damp; her hair would be a mass of frizzing ringlets if she spent so much time in this place of mist and shadows. Her heart thumped in her hollow chest, fear and revulsion warring with a painful tug of longing. _You imagined me, and I imagined you – oh God, I want to dream again. I want to forget about all of this and just have my angel back. _

The mannequin remained still and silent, giving her its back. _You imagined me – and I imagined you – we're all mad here – _

Christine spun and walked with careful, unsteady steps back down to the lakeside chamber. Madame Giry opened her mouth to protest; Christine held her hand out, gesturing at the rags the other woman held. Madame Giry's mouth shut with a snap, her expression going sharp and assessing. "Please," Christine asked. Erik had backed away to the very farthest point he could; if he retreated any further, he'd be standing in the lake.

"He will never let you," Madame Giry answered. "I know you mean well, child, but it hurts him just to have you here, now, when he is like this." There was a thread of pity to her tone that seemed to weave its way directly into Christine's spine, where it turned to steel.

"Then he will need to develop calluses," Christine retorted, in a high and tremulous voice; Madame Giry's own words, her customary response to complaints of sore and blistered feet. Christine's hands shook, but she reached out and took the rags anyway; the older woman did not resist. Pitcher in hand, Christine crossed the room; discarded stubs of charcoal crunched under her shoes. Up close, he really did smell wretched, but she resolutely ignored it.

"Will you let me help you?" she asked, her voice wobbling and childish, but determined.

"Why did you have to come?" he asked plaintively, eyes darting between her face and the multitude of charcoal faces around them. Christine looked back over her shoulder and shuddered; the likeness of a young boy jabbed a pudgy finger at her, laughing nastily. The hand was rendered in such perfect detail that it seemed to reach out into the room; she had the sudden, skin-crawling feeling that it might grab her hair. She made herself turn her back to it, facing him, and very deliberately positioning herself between him and the wall. A shiver ran over her skin as her hair brushed against the papers.

"I went to the chapel," Christine said; somewhere behind her Madame Giry's footsteps were retreating. "Every day. I – I wanted to see you again. I missed you. You didn't answer."

"I was -" he tried to look around her; she stepped to the side, keeping herself in front of him, between him and all those cruel faces and pointing hands. His eyes settled back on her face. "My apologies," he said finally, "I lost track of the time."

"I can see that," she responded carefully.

"You weren't meant to!" he wailed, squeezing his eyes shut and bringing his hands up to his face. "I meant only to give you music – beauty -"

"You are a talented artist," she offered. "Though I'm afraid I do not care for your subjects."

He gave a strangled laugh that was half a sob.

"Madame Giry is right, you should sit," she suggested.

"Leave the rags and the wash-water," he said from behind his hands, still standing. "Go, find the library as she said, or go explore whatever you wish, what is mine is yours, but just go, and let me compose myself. You needn't see this."

"You're wrong," Christine said softly. Erik's hands lowered from his face; his stare was incredulous and abruptly wary. "I did need to see this," she went on, though his tense, watchful stillness frightened her. She remembered his mercurial change of temper up on the roof, and was very aware of how close they now stood.

"Why?" he demanded, in the dark tone Christine remembered as prelude to his last angry outburst. "Why should you need to see _this_?" His voice rose and he gestured in disgust at himself and the room around him, his movement sharp and violent. It was an effort of extreme will to stay where she was, when every trembling muscle in her body spurred her to flight. "So that you might bury your last shred of hope?" he suggested bitterly, taking half a step towards her. "To kill the last remnant of affection you might have felt for your _angel_?" He loomed over her, charcoal-streaked, wild-eyed and mad. Christine heard other footsteps re-entering the room and then stopping abruptly, some distance away, but Erik seemed to be aware only of her.

"Forget your angel, foolish child," he sneered, and Christine flinched and closed her eyes at the cruelty of his tone. The hundreds of taunting, tormenting faces behind her flashed through her mind. _Of course he can be cruel, _she told herself sternly. _He has had so very many teachers. _"Your angel is dead," he spat, "and this is his hell. You'd best flee while you can."

She opened her eyes, making herself meet his gaze. "No," she said simply, though she shook.

"You think to defy me?" he snarled. "What a brave little mouse -"

"Stop this!" she snapped, louder than she'd intended; her voice echoed about the cavern, and they both winced. "Stop this," she repeated, more quietly and with deliberate calm. "I won't be frightened away, so you may as well cease trying. Yes, I needed to see this, to see that -" She swallowed hard and her guts twisted themselves into knots, but she forced herself to continue. "– that what happened to Buquet - "

He flinched and lurched half a step back from her, as though she'd struck him.

" – I needed to see that it troubled you, that it wasn't – that you couldn't just - you've created this terrible penance for yourself," she pressed on, though the words came out jumbled, her calm slipping and her voice cracking as she followed him, half a step, and his back was to the water, nowhere left to go. "How can you tell me this is your hell, and then ask me to leave you here? I know you're not the angel I imagined you to be, but – but you _were_, for so long," she pleaded, reaching for his hands but stopping just short of touching. "I missed you terribly, these past days. I don't care anymore what you are, I just miss you. I miss my friend," she confessed, blinking furiously at the tears that wanted to come. "I miss him and it pains me to know he is suffering."

"Christine," he whispered hoarsely, his anger fled. He looked down at his hands, clenched into fists, hovering just a breath away from her own entreating fingers. "Don't you see? Can't you see why you must go now? I never meant – never – I thought I could give you my music, but not this. Only music, not ever this -"

"I don't want only your music," Christine insisted; she thought of the mannequin in its wedding dress, but did not question the sincerity of his words. It seemed all too heartbreakingly possible, suddenly, that he could have imagined a marriage of voices and nothing more. She remembered turning in his arms, that first night here, seeking a kiss – she remembered him pulling away. "It is wonderful, beautiful music, but it is tatters, crumbs of what you have been to me."

"Your friend," he repeated, sounding utterly lost and bewildered.

"More than that," she admitted. "It frightens me, but I think I could forgive you anything. Please, please don't send me away."

He looked as frightened as she felt.

"Please?" Christine asked again, hands still outstretched. _Fear can turn to love, you said, you'll learn to see – please, please see me, real and here in front of you – let me be more than your untouchable muse. _

Slowly, as if it required great effort, he unclenched his fists and placed his hands tentatively in hers. Christine smiled brilliantly, wanting to laugh at the rush of relief and hope that poured through her, making her knees weak. His hands tightened convulsively, suddenly clinging, almost to the point of pain. She pulled him back from the water's edge and sat beside the pitcher, tugging him down with her; she was careful to be sure that his back was to the wall. There was a shaking, relieved sigh from behind her, and Erik's eyes fixed in surprise on a point just over her shoulder. It was obvious he'd forgotten there was anyone else in the cellar with them – perhaps that there was anyone else in the world.

"I found bread," Madame Giry announced, setting a plate with a torn half-loaf on the ground beside them. Her hand settled briefly on Christine's shoulder, squeezing. "It is stale and hard as rocks, but not moldy. I will return with better fare." Then she left them.

Christine waited for the span of two breaths, steeling herself, then reached for his mask. He was still, allowing it, but she found to her frustration that it was too far away to be reached while sitting. Their legs bumped, and she teetered, almost falling into his lap. Her hands flailed for some appropriate part of his person to use to steady herself; her left hand ended up on his thigh, just above the knee, for a scalding moment. Heat rushed into her face and she drew back instantly, gathering herself into a crouch. She was too flustered to look him in the eye for several seconds, but then her gaze fell again on the jeering, charcoal-sketched crowd behind him, and she felt pitifully childish and ashamed.

He remained silent and unmoving, unprotesting, when she rose up on her knees and, this time, found the mask's edge with her fingertips. She pried gently, but it would not peel away; the skin of his forehead came with it, tenting away from his face, and something beneath it made a sickly squelching sound.

"You affix it with glue," Christine realized aloud, letting it settle back into place; Madame Giry's consternation at the idea that he'd left it on for days suddenly made far more horrifying sense. "Paste – like for false beards."

"Ties are too unreliable," he explained tonelessly, then paused. "Though I have other masks that tie. I may have to make do with one of those, until I can acquire more glue - I believe all my sticking paste is on the walls."

Christine felt very much in danger of crying again. "I'm going to have to hurt you, to pull this free."

"I will do it," he offered, and began to reach for it, but she batted his hands away.

"No, let me," she insisted, though her voice wobbled and her stomach felt quite unsteady. "I can do it. I just hate to hurt you." She pressed her right hand flat against his forehead, holding the skin down, while the fingertips of her left hand curled around the upper edge of the mask. The flesh beneath it felt unnaturally hot. "Are you prepared?"

He gave a small, humorless laugh; she could feel the vibration of it through her hands, and it made her queasy stomach jump. "I have endured far worse; you trouble yourself needlessly."

Christine had no idea what to say to that, and so instead she clenched her jaw and pulled. The mask came away from his face with a wet ripping sound and a burst of the sickly smell she'd been trying so hard to ignore. She couldn't help gagging. There were things stuck to the back of the mask that she could not identify as glue or skin; it was an effort not to throw it across the room, but she doubted he'd thank her for breaking it. Instead she set it on the ground behind her, out of her sight, grabbed up a handful of rags and dipped them in the pitcher. She turned back to face him, and the only thing she saw was the line of oozing red that ran from the center of his forehead all along his hairline, almost to his ear.

"Oh God, you're bleeding," she yelped, and leapt forward to press the damp rags to his forehead. Her other hand cupped the back of his head. The wad of cloth fell down to obscure most of the right side of his face, though not the twisted, flattened half of his nose. His left eye – the only one visible – was closed.

"I am sorry you have to see -" he gestured defeatedly up at his face, "- this."

"You should be!" Christine snapped unthinkingly, lifting the rags and peering under them to see if the bleeding had stopped; it had, but the flesh looked like raw meat. "Don't you ever, ever do this again!"

His eyes blinked open, looking startled, as she moved the rags away and surveyed the whole of his face, looking everywhere but in his eyes. She had no idea how it looked normally – she'd gotten only the briefest of glimpses, the first time she'd taken his mask, before he'd flown into a rage and covered his face with his hands – but surely his skin should not be such an unnatural color, and chafed and peeling in places. The whole of his face still looked like a harlequin mask, one side angry red, the other smudged in black. Finally, she met his stunned gaze, cringing as her exclamation replayed itself in her head. "You know I meant this -" she gestured helplessly with the bloody rags, "- injury." It was such an inadequate word.

"You did," he agreed softly. "I know you did." She had to turn away from the amazement in his voice, pulling bloodstained rags apart from those that remained clean and wetting those again. The dripping of the water back into the pitcher echoed with crystalline clarity in the silence. She brought the clean rags back to his face, steadying herself with one hand on his shoulder and dabbing carefully at the places that looked most raw. He sucked in a hissing breath at the touch of the cloth, and she drew back instantly.

"Am I hurting you?" she exclaimed, wincing. "Perhaps it would be better to wait for Madame Giry; she would certainly be a more competent nurse than I."

"Are you real?" he asked, hushed and awed.

"What?" Christine stammered.

"I think I've dreamed this," Erik responded.

Christine found herself speechless for a long moment. "Then you are in dire need of better dreams," she finally retorted, in a tone of quiet determination.

* * *

"Mama?" Meg called out softly, slipping into her mother's suite of rooms. She slipped her key back into her pocket and tip-toed into the bedroom. "Are you asleep?" 

The bed was empty, and undisturbed. "Mama?" Meg called a little more loudly, turning slowly and frowning. She checked the little wash-room and then ventured back into the small space that served for a sitting room, just to be sure she had not walked right past a figure asleep in a chair. She had not; the tiny apartment was empty.

It was very late, and Meg knew her mother would not have been out taking part in the last dregs of celebration still winding down in the hallways. _She is with him. Her 'ghost'. Erik, who smells of damp and stone, who wears very fine shoes and uses a great deal of paper. _

Then, a thought that came like a blow to the stomach – _and Christine is gone as well. _

Meg had suspected the instant Christine spoke of him that her 'angel' and Meg's mother's 'ghost' must be one in the same, but she'd never considered that anyone but the man who was both knew it. Christine had not, Meg was certain of that, remembering her friend weeping inconsolably the night of Buquet's death. But her mother – could her mother have known? Could her mother have allowed it?

_Could she have taken Christine to him – trusted Christine with her secrets – all the things she would never tell me, places she would never take me – she never trusted me enough – but she'll trust Christine –_

Meg sat down heavily on the chaise, staring blankly at the opposite wall; there was the distinct temptation to sob. She did not, however; instead she folded her hands in her lap, squared her shoulders in grim determination, and set her mind to staying awake until her mother returned.


	4. Chapter 4

Antoinette Giry carried a cane; she did not use it. She knew that most of her girls felt it was a prop, affected, a bit of theatre to make her that much more formidable. This was a perception she encouraged; the older girls, the ones who had been around long enough to have glimpsed things she might have preferred them to miss, let the younger ones keep their comforting delusions.

It was comfort, after all, to imagine there existed such a thing as a person who felt no pain and knew no weakness. She stood in place of mother and father for those girls, even those with parents still living out in the world. Her own mother had been alive when she came here - her painfully thin, beautiful mother, widowed and destitute and with all her desperate hopes pinned on graceful Antoinette.

She knew the world outside looked in at the fey little creatures who were her charges and imagined a pretty faery-tale of childish dreams realized. Noble little girls and the daughters of rich businessmen attended the ballet and dreamed; the daughters of butchers and dead sailors danced for them. They were all orphans here, because no girl came here who did not know her mother and father to be mortal, whether they still breathed or not.

Thus it fell to Antoinette, no longer so young, no longer so graceful, to be a little bit immortal for them. She would not hobble like an old woman in front of them; she would be as invincible as she could be, so that they could be girls, maybe a little longer than she'd been able.

It was a long, long way down to the caves and back again, though – long and cold and damp, the clicking of her joints with every step she took counting off the years she'd danced, like a miserly banker counting his coins. _This much you owe. _Antoinette carried a cane she did not use because she needed one, and in extremity, it was better to lean on it a moment than to fall. It would be unthinkable to let them see her fall.

She leaned on her cane the better part of the walk back into the world above-ground; there was no one to see her there, and in the deep, cold dark she felt a prick of envy for Erik and his mask and his dark and his madness, into which he could escape at will.

No, not at will, she scolded herself. _Not at will at all, and you are a bitter old woman to even think that. _

In another world, another life, she might not have been so old; she was only thirty-seven. It was not young, but there were women who bore babies at thirty-seven. Antoinette could not even imagine it, as she dragged her way back up into the meager light of burnt-down candles. Muffled voices murmured from corners, and the corridors were redolent of sweat and smoke and alcohol. She picked her creaking, aching away around bodies curled into corners like oversized dormice. Their joints would raise protest in the morning, along with their heads, but for the moment the celebrants slept well, and Antoinette let them.

Here and there she saw a somnolent form, a half-hidden face or a familiar shoe, that belonged one of her girls, and prayed for a lack of broken hearts and quickened bellies, but she did not disturb them. It would be a mistake, she knew, to guard them too closely. She could not guard them from the way their joints would begin to ache at the end of the day, how they would tire more quickly, the critical eye the managers would begin to pass over them; no one dances forever. Most of them had five, maybe ten years; fifteen for the very blessed.

Then they would have to find their way out into the world – unless, like her, they found some way to stay. Some way to linger on, like ghosts.

Yes, she acknowledged, shamed, some part of her did hate Erik very much – not so much as she loved him, but it was there, some hidden part.

Antoinette opened her door to find her daughter there in her sitting room, asleep in a chair. She set her cane against the door-jam and stood as straight as she could. "Meg?" she whispered questioningly; the girl did not stir.

It was a relief to know she was not curled into a corner somewhere, draped around some random male body. She was sensible, Antoinette knew, but so beautiful, and young enough to be just discovering that fact. It could not have escaped her Meg's notice, how some of the other girls used their beauty; she was sharp, her Meg, clever and watchful of everything.

And guarded, Antoinette thought as she tip-toed across the room, taking the opportunity to observe her child's face relaxed in sleep. There was a softness about her mouth and her eyes, a carelessness to the drape of her hands that reminded Antoinette of when she was much smaller – it was an expression, Antoinette realized, that she had not seen on her daughter's waking face in some time. Sometime between being the loose-limbed, sleeping toddler carted about on Antoinette's hip and turning into the woman now asleep in her chair, Meg had learned to hide her thoughts and seem pleased with what she had.

Maybe she even was; she would dance for twenty years at the least, if Antoinette had any say in the matter.

_She would never ache, she would never bend, she would never hate, if I had any say in the matter, _Antoinette thought. _She would look just as she does now forever. _

What Meg wanted or dreamed, what had taught Meg to guard her face and her thoughts, Antoinette did not know and was afraid to ask. She knew there was no young man, at least not one regularly. She had never seen her daughter drunk, nor in an opium trance. She was healthy. She smiled. And she danced. It was enough – it had to be enough, because Antoinette had nothing else to give her. If it wasn't enough, Antoinette didn't think she wanted to know, and could take a mournful sort of pride in the knowledge that she'd raised a daughter wise and thoughtful enough to appear contented.

_I taught her, and she learned well, _Antoinette thought, bending painfully over the sleeping form and brushing a strand of pale golden hair away from her daughter's face. Jules' hair had been just such a shade of gold; in her youth, Antoinette had been fair as well, but she had darkened.

Meg frowned in her sleep.

"Marguerite," Antoinette whispered, and the frown tightened. "Come, my Meg, open your eyes. Foolish child, why did you not take the bed?"

Meg blinked, muttering something unintelligible, before focusing on her mother. Antoinette smiled reassuringly at her daughter's dream-fogged bewilderment.

Meg continued to frown, her eyes only half lucid; she reached out with clumsy fingers to grasp the cuff of Antoinette's sleeve. Antoinette's gaze followed her daughter's hand and saw that the cuff was wet.

"You smell like cold," Meg murmured, cross and dreamy, brow still furrowed.

"And you are asleep," Antoinette responded, smiling softly. She gently pried her daughter's fingers away from her sleeve and gave them a little squeeze. "Come, up with you." She felt no need to ask why Meg was there, not on the closing night of a performance; Antoinette was careful not to venture anywhere near the dormitories on such occasions, and assumed Meg had simply wanted to sleep in peace. She stood and turned towards the bedroom.

"Where have you been?" Meg pressed sleepily; she had not moved from the chair.

"Nowhere that need concern you," Antoinette replied gently. "Come now, up – I cannot carry you to bed anymore."

"No," Meg agreed, her frown losing its sleepiness. "No, I'm not a little child."

It was an odd thing for her Meg to say, unlike her. "No, you're not," Antoinette agreed carefully. "You are becoming a beautiful, talented young woman. I am -"

"We couldn't find Christine," Meg interrupted.

"She is safe and well; she was with me," Antoinette replied.

"But where was she, with you?" Meg asked, voice rising.

"That is not your concern," Antoinette snapped, her patience evaporating. "Marguerite Giry, you should not be so eager to borrow troubles!" She turned away towards the bedroom once more. "I will not have the luxury of sleep tonight, but you will, and ought to be sensible of the privilege. Now you will take yourself to bed!"

"I will not," Meg responded in a trembling voice.

"And why will you not?" Antoinette demanded impatiently, pausing, still facing away from her daughter. Meg said nothing; Antoinette glanced back over her shoulder, and saw her daughter's hands clutched tight together and her jaw stubbornly set. Tired as she was, she could feel only annoyance, where perhaps there should have been curiosity as to what had so unsettled her usually placid child. "Well?" she said sharply.

"Did you ask him to kill Buquet?" Meg asked quietly.

* * *

"Here," Christine offered, tearing off a chunk of the near-petrified loaf of bread Madame Giry had found. It crumbled like old plaster, but it was nourishment. Once cleaned, the side of his face which had not been masked was revealed to be an alarming shade of pale, sickly yellow. His cheek, even on the more ordinary half of his countenance, was more sunken than she remembered, and the line of his jaw sharper. 

He took the offered chunk of bread with a hand that shook badly, watching her with an expression of unwavering awe.

Christine blushed, but did not look away; it seemed terribly important that she not look away. Instead she smiled encouragingly, still working at the loaf of bread with her fingertips, trying to get a piece for herself. She was not remotely hungry, but she thought it might put him more at ease if she ate as well.

He put the bit of bread into his mouth whilst still staring at her as if bewitched. Then he grimaced, his whole face contorting with it.

"Erik?" Christine asked, alarmed. He shook his head rapidly, a hand flying up to his mouth; she could see his throat working as he lurched unsteadily to his feet. She dropped the loaf back onto the plate and hurried to follow him as he wove and stumbled to the water's edge, then spat the mouthful of bread into the lake.

Christine hovered, feeling her own stomach twisting in nausea as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, swallowing frantically. He was sweating again, and she could see the movement of his ribs through his thin shirt as his diaphragm spasmed. He made a noise that sounded painful, a tearing sort of gag that seemed to catch in his throat and made Christine wince, her hand fluttering to her own neck. _His throat will be sore – he will have to rest his voice – _She stayed half a pace back, not knowing what to do. He was not sick, perhaps because there was nothing in his stomach. After a few moments he calmed, his breathing becoming more shallow, though he continued to shake.

"Erik?" she enquired again, shuffling a tentative fraction of a step closer.

He attempted to turn towards her, and his knees buckled. She gave a cry and darted forward, images of him tumbling into the water and disappearing beneath the dark surface flying through her mind. She caught one of his flailing hands in her own, while her other hand found his shirt and clung. His face had gone even more disturbingly pale, and was twisted into a grimace of utmost humiliation, his eyes screwed tightly shut. He clung to her hand as he stumbled, trying to regain his balance, but she had to reach out and pull free arm across her shoulders. He would not do it himself.

"Christine," he groaned miserably.

"Erik," she replied, as steadily as she could; her voice trembled terribly regardless of her intentions. He was heavy, too heavy, and her own legs wanted to give way. She was completely unaccustomed to having so much close contact with a male, which was unsettling all on its own, and beyond that, the smell of him was making her eyes water.

He was also shockingly, unnaturally hot, where he was pressed against her.

"You know my name," he said, at the same time she blurted out, "My God, you're burning with fever!"

His eyes opened, meeting hers. "Madame Giry told me," she offered. "Your name, I mean."

"What else -" he began in a wary tone.

"Nothing else," she hurried to assure him. "I do not think I can hold you much longer," she confessed, then tightened her grip on his hand when he would have flinched away. "Please, I do not mind, but I lack the strength – we must get you to bed."

The wide-eyed look he gave her then made her flush with such intensity that she was momentarily dizzy; she had to look down at the floor. "You are ill," she muttered almost inaudibly, "and in need of rest."

"Of – of course," he stammered, and together they stumbled towards the stairs.

* * *

Meg watched in grim determination as her mother spun, eyes wide and face ashen. "What did you say?" 

"I asked," Meg repeated, and had to pause to swallow, her voice trembling, "if the ghost killed Buquet because – because you asked him to."

Antoinette stared silently, her face a mask of shock. Then she ducked her head, swearing softly, and stumbled back to sit heavily on the chaise across the small room. Meg stayed where she was, chin up and stomach writhing.

"Why can you not let this alone?" Antoinette asked softly, shaking her head and not meeting her daughter's eyes. "It is not your burden."

"All the opera knows he is _your _ghost, and you are _my_ mother," Meg protested, "and yet I know nothing, while Christine -"

Antoinette's head whipped up, pinning Meg with a fiercely reproving glare. "Do not envy Christine," she snapped.

"Why shouldn't I?" Meg retorted, jumping to her feet. "Tell me why I should not! Tell me _something_! Don't you trust me at all?"

Antoinette held her gazed stubbornly. "Very well – I will tell you that I did not, would not, ask him to kill anyone. What would put such an idea into your head?"

"Oh," Meg responded, abruptly off-kilter and floundering. "I – I thought -" She swallowed hard, flushed, and sat. "He – Buquet – he grabbed Regine, and you – with his rope -" Her mother sighed.

"Yes, it was a threat, but an empty one, and he knew it. He knew altogether too much – maybe that is why he is dead, I do not know," she confessed, throwing up her hands.

"You don't know?" Meg asked in a small voice.

"The Opera Ghost – you know he is a living man, don't you?" Antoinette asked, her tone resigned.

"Yes," Meg responded. "I remember – when I was small – I remember he visited us, in the night. You bought him shoes." This curved Antoinette's lips into a small, humorless smile.

"I thought you slept through all that," she said, with a self-deprecating shake of her head. "I should have known better; you are my daughter, after all."

"You called him Erik," Meg offered.

"Yes, that is his name," Antoinette agreed. "And no, I do not know why he killed Buquet. I would never ask such a thing of him, never."

"You – you care for him," Meg ventured, very carefully.

"If you would have me speak with you like a grown woman, then speak like one yourself," Antoinette snapped impatiently. "What do you mean to ask?"

"Is he your lover?" Meg blurted out, clutching her hands together in her lap to keep her mother from seeing how they shook.

"No," Antoinette replied evenly. "No, and he never has been. He is more like a brother or a son to me than anything else. I gave him the best home that I could. I did all that I could, but -" she spread her hands, then let them drop to her sides, "- there is only so much that can be done. Some things – some things cannot be changed, cannot be healed. He had been too long taught that he was a beast, a demon. The devil's child."

"Taught by who? Why?" Meg asked, mind spinning a dizzy, queasy whirl at the images her mother's spare words conjured. Then, another terrible thought; "Christine was with you - Christine is with _him_, even now, isn't she?"

"Yes, Christine is with him," Antoinette agreed tiredly.

"But he is dangerous!" Meg exclaimed, aghast. "You just admitted it, he killed Buquet, he is a murderer -"

"Do not judge what you do not understand," her mother interrupted sharply.

"I would understand better if you would explain!" Meg retorted.

"I am answering your questions, am I not?" Antoinette returned.

"You are not!" Meg protested. "Your answers tell me nothing, explain nothing at -"

"Lower your voice," her mother ordered.

" – all," Meg concluded, voice dropping to an embarrassed hush and face flushing. "I'm sorry."

"You are not," Antoinette countered. "You are horrified at me."

Meg flushed more darkly, half a dozen conflicting sentiments caught in her throat, but no words making themselves available.

"Very well," Antoinette answered with a graceful nod of her head, "You have reason to be." She said nothing else, though Meg waited.

"That is all?" Meg finally demanded, incredulous. "I do have reason to be! You admit he killed Buquet for God only knows what mad reason, yet you still keep his secrets, you defend him, and – and Christine is with him, now, as we speak! Why is Christine with him, why does Christine know what I do not, why is she permitted to see what I -"

"Because I could not reach her myself," Antoinette interrupted quietly.

"What?" Meg asked in utter exasperation, hovering on the verge of tears. "You could not reach her? What does that mean?"

* * *

"Here we are," Christine murmured, and managed to twist herself about so that Erik fell in the general direction of the bed before she collapsed, trembling, to sit on its narrow edge. It took some time for her to catch her breath, and she let her eyes flutter closed in exhaustion. 

For a long moment, all was calm, and Christine was filled with an absurd sense of accomplishment. She could feel his eyes on her, but let her own remain shut; it was strange to think that he was right there beside her, so close, fragile flesh and blood, but his scrutiny was easily borne. That, at least, was familiar, almost comforting. Minutes ticked by, and Christine felt the lateness of the hour settling on her, all the heavier for the depth of brick and earth and stone it had to pass to reach her there, where day and night had no meaning.

It felt safe, having his eyes on her, and she was suddenly so very tired. She had slept in that bed before, knew it was warm and soft; now that she was still, her pulse slowing, sweat cooling on her skin and the hot flush of exertion fading, that warmth was very inviting. It was a scandalous thought, to lay down in the same bed with a man, and half of her was quite frantically appalled – but that half was already badly unsettled, overwhelmed and worn thin. He was ill; that leant a measure of decency to it, didn't it? Her intent was not sinful, not lustful – she just wanted to be warm, and safe, and to explore the sheer novelty of being next to him -

"You must not leave these rooms while I sleep."

Christine startled at the sound of Erik's voice, jolted back from her drifting into full wakefulness. She turned and looked at him worriedly; there was a fearful urgency to his tone, and he was struggling to sit up, reaching for her. She took his hand and tried not to wince at the strength of his grip, or the sickly heat of his flesh.

"You mustn't," he repeated fervently. "It's not safe."

"I will be careful," Christine tried to reassure him, laying her other hand over his. "I won't get lost." _He is laying atop the sheets, and still in his shoes. I am possibly the most dreadful nurse there ever was. _All thought of laying down at his side, snug and peaceful, fled.

"You mustn't try to go back!" he exclaimed frantically, her ambiguous assurance serving only to further alarm him. "There are things – traps – they're not meant to kill," he hastened to add. "But if I weren't watching, they could. I'm careful to watch them; they're necessary, but I'm careful to watch them."

"I know," Christine murmured soothingly. His eyes were dilated, his hair sticking out wildly around his head; she wanted to reach out and smooth it, but didn't dare.

"I would guide you around them," he insisted, "You would be safe with me."

"Of course I would," Christine agreed.

"You must stay – you must stay with me!" His hand tightened on hers to the point of pain and his tone hardened, the volume of his voice rising sharply and turning fiercely autocratic. Some detached and critical part of Christine's mind noted a slight rasp. _You mustn't strain your throat – mustn't risk your voice, your beautiful voice - _

"Please don't shout," she answered softly. "Yes, I'll stay. Of course I'll stay."

He stared, breathing hard and clutching her fingers; after a seemingly infinite moment, his grip relaxed.

"They're necessary," he whispered miserably. "People are stupid beasts, never listening when they're told to stay away, always prying – always wanting to see – they make me take these measures! But I would guide you around the traps, they weren't meant for you. They weren't meant to keep you here."

"Shh," Christine murmured, screwing up her courage and reaching out to brush his hair out of his face, smoothing it down over the back of his head and tucking it behind his ears while he just stared and shook. Her hand came away smeared in charcoal dust and faintly greasy, but that was a very small thing compared to the look on his face.

It was so very, unfathomably strange to be able to touch him, her angel – to be the one offering comfort. Half of her felt as though she could weep with the joy of it; the other half just wanted to weep, and she was so very, very tired.

"I won't try to go back," she insisted. "I don't want to leave you, until I see you're well again."

He flinched at that, and nodded. Though his hand remained in hers, he seemed to draw away, shoulders rounding, eyes studying the tangled clutch of their fingers and avoiding her face. _What did I – _

_- oh. Until you're well again. And then? _

"And then you will show me all your traps and mazes," she pressed on, "so that I may come and go – that is, if you wish," she concluded awkwardly, suddenly unsure of herself as his eyes snapped back up to her face, feverishly bright.

He swallowed several times before he managed to say, "You – you wish to come and go – on your own? You would come to me yourself?"

"If you wanted me," Christine said hurriedly. "Not too often. I would not make a pest of myself."

He laughed, a harsh burst of sound that made her jump, and his hand broke free of hers to reach toward her face. "If I wanted – my God, Christine -" He let his fingers fall just a breath, a shiver away from her cheek; his hand dropped into the sheets. She realized abruptly that he was swaying where he sat, as though it took great effort for him not to fall back onto the bed. "Please," he said hoarsely, his eyes struggling to remain open. "Please don't wander – stay where there is light. Where the candles are lit, you should be safe."

A flash of fear skittered across Christine's mind and sent a shudder through her weary limbs. _I saw candles everywhere. _She thought – hoped – that he hadn't seen it.

"I will stay where there is light," she promised; he held her gaze as if he might thus hold her to her word. "I swear. Lay back and sleep; nothing will happen to me."

He kept watching her, as if he didn't dare believe her – or perhaps as if he feared that she would vanish like a dream.

It felt different and new, this meeting of gazes; it made a slow heat trickle down the back of her neck and a flush rise in her cheeks, though she was not embarrassed. Her skin prickled, rather like the sensation of slipping into a bath with the water just a little too hot, almost burning.

The thought that she could just lay down beside him was there again, made suddenly impossible by the unexpectedly desperate, thirsty way she wanted it. That he was both feverish and filthy didn't seem to matter at all. She wanted to press close to the beating of his heart, to feel it in her own chest. It was at once tempting and petrifying, and the fear – a far more familiar emotion – won out. She stayed where she was, on the bed's hard, narrow edge, her heart thumping almost painfully.

"W-would you like me to tell you a story?" she ventured, hushed.

"Yes," he answered, just as quietly. "Yes - very much."

"Lay down," Christine whispered. "Close your eyes." He did. "Little Lotte let her mind wander . . . "

* * *

"You know that Christine -" Meg watched in anxious, almost tearful frustration as her mother shrugged helplessly, seeming at a loss for words. 

_I know nothing, _Meg wanted to shout, _nothing at all, because you will not tell me! _

"She does not live in the world," Antoinette finally concluded, though she didn't look entirely satisfied with this explanation.

"I don't understand," Meg pressed stubbornly. _Why can you not just say what you mean, plainly? _"Where else can she live?"

"In her mind," Antoinette sighed. "In all those wretched tales Gustave told her – I could kick the man for it, if he hadn't suffered so much, though I suppose he meant well."

"She's imaginative," Meg countered, a note of defensiveness creeping into her voice on Christine's behalf. "She loves those stories; they're all she has left of him. I don't see how it matters, how it makes any difference as far as your 'ghost' is concerned, if she likes to imagine -"

"She does not imagine," her mother interrupted. "That is the difference it makes – she does not imagine, she believes, she -" Antoinette paused again, giving Meg an almost fearful, weighing look. "- she hears things, sees things that are not there," she concluded quietly. "She has since she was a child, even when Gustave was alive – he didn't want to see it, wanted to believe as you do that it was only a vivid imagination, but I saw, even as infrequently as I visited them. She was never a normal child – and then he grew ill, he died, and -" Antoinette gave another helpless shrug. "I did not know what to do with her. I brought her here and I fed her and I clothed her and I tried to show her kindness, but -" and again her hands lifted, imploring.

"But she's alright," Meg protested. "I remember she cried all the time at first, she was very quiet and shy, but she's alright now."

"She was not quiet and shy," Antoinette countered tiredly. "She was silent. She spoke to no one, no one at all."

"She missed her father," Meg insisted; there was a queasy coldness forming in the pit of her gut, and her pulse had picked up its step. _She was grieving, like any child would, and she's just quiet. It's just her nature. There's nothing wrong with her. _

"Yes," Antoinette agreed. "She missed him very much, but she is not the first or the last girl to come here orphaned, and I know something of what is to be expected and what is not."

"She's just quiet," Meg repeated determinedly.

"One day she would not get out of her bed – do you remember?" Antoinette asked; Meg opened her mouth to say that she did remember a little, only vaguely; Christine had not yet been her friend, and what she remembered most was her own jealousy at the attention her mother bestowed upon the sick little girl. Antoinette pressed on before Meg had a chance to speak. "I sent for a doctor, and he berated me – oh, the things he said to me I will never forget, and will not repeat. She must have been very ill for some time, he told me, a child does not reach such a state overnight. She nearly died without ever complaining – without ever speaking a word, and I did not even notice."

"She did not die, and when she recovered, I tried to watch her more closely," Antoinette continued. This, Meg also remembered, the memory again colored by childish envy and a feeling of abandonment.

"Imagine my surprise when I discovered she did speak," Antoinette was saying. "At great length, and in terms I would not have expected from a child – of course, who ever spoke simply to her? When she was alone in the chapel and thought no one was listening, she spoke of all her thoughts and her hopes and her troubles, to God, and to her father, and to her angel of music."

"To your Erik," Meg said.

"No," Antoinette shook her head, and the look she gave her daughter was gentle, pitying. "Not yet."

* * *

It was very quiet once Erik slept; Christine sat with him for some time before she began to feel restless, and ventured forth. 

He had called his home _the seat of sweet music's throne, _and indeed it seemed like some strange and wondrous realm, apart from the world above. Her fingers trailed oh so very carefully over the keys of the pipe organ, raised on its dais like a sacrifice on an altar. She crept down the stairs into the adjoining room, trying very hard to ignore the faces that adorned the walls and to see only what worldly things her angel had chosen to keep near him. Surely those things, acquired or created when he was more himself, could tell her more of who he was.

_My Angel of Music – my mad, horrible, beautiful angel, who has made this world for himself. _Masks of porcelain, of paper mache, of leather, lay scattered about this room; one could not walk two paces without having a mask at hand. These Christine did not touch, feeling as though to do so would be an unwelcome invasion of his privacy, but she let her fingers dance across the mildewing spines of much-handled books, skim across pots of paint and a gathering of brushes stuck into a vase like a strange bouquet. His small facsimile of the opera stage was a work of art itself, a tiny kingdom within a kingdom, peopled by small wooden replicas of everyone she knew.

Something scritched in the wall to her left, and she glanced up, startled. The paper mob met her eyes, laughing nastily at her flinching. Christine spun hurriedly away from them, facing back towards the pipe organ. _I will pay them no mind. There is more to him than his madness, and more to this place._

_- this kingdom where all must pay homage to music -_

She tiptoed back up the stairs, along the ledge that led to the bedroom and past it, finding a little curtained washroom with a toilet and a tub and a multitude of pipes disappearing into a wide crack in the floor. At the back of the room sat a huge metal contraption over top of what looked like a small stove; she could not guess its purpose, and the chasm in the floor made her nervous, so she moved on. Next was the library Madame Giry had mentioned, shelves upon shelves of books rising up into impenetrable dimness. Most of the candles here were unlit, and it was too dark for her comfort, so she retreated; there were more tunnels beyond, but they were darker still. Mindful of her promise, Christine drew back towards the familiar set of rooms by the lakeside.

She paused at the door to the bedroom, straining for the sound of Erik's breathing; it was faint, but she thought it sounded deep and even.

Having teased her hearing to such a pitch of sensitivity, she perceived other sounds; the soft lapping of the lake, yet more scratching somewhere past the walls, and a distant dripping. She shivered, wrapping her arms about herself; they were not comforting sounds. Her one previous visit had been a mad whirl of overwhelming emotions, first breathless wonder at the discovery that her angel was someone she could see and touch, then bewildered pain at his rejection when she'd taken his mask. Then, returning tonight, she had been subsumed in his own agony of madness.

Always, the force of his personality had filled the place; Christine found it very different in his slumbering absence. It was cold, and still, and much too quiet. Where she stood amid the candles it was almost painfully bright to her tired eyes, but beyond that was dark – a deep, impenetrable, gaping dark. It occurred to her that without the fragile light of the candles, it would be complete blackness, no moon or starlight to which her eyes might adjust in time, but just utter, blinding black.

The lake lapped softly at the shore, and Christine heard a new and sinister note in its whispering, as if it resented the candles and their light, and her. Without Erik's voice, Erik's dominating presence, these caves whispered of what they might have been had he never come. The lake had been there before he was; Christine felt herself an intruder into a kingdom not of music, but of scampering, sharp-toothed things that ran blind in the dark. The bright fabrics and polished metals with which Erik had surrounded himself, the trappings of art and music and science, seemed frail defenses indeed without their master.

_I felt safe with him. He knows this darkness; he has made peace with it, and it accepts him._

Her eyes flickered again to the faces on the walls, watching her with scornful derision. _It is all that has ever accepted him._ She knew nothing of his past, though she meant to ask, but those faces needed no explanation; every one of them had a flesh and blood counterpart, she was certain. No imagination, however brilliant or demented, could imagine such human detail – the crook of a previously broken nose, a loose stitch on the finger of a glove, the exact crinkle of the skin around cruelly laughing eyes.

She knew not where or how, but she knew that every one of those faces had stared and laughed and pointed at him just so, once. It was fitting that they be sketched in ash, for these images, these cruel memories, had been burnt into his very soul.

And there she stood doing nothing to oppose them, she realized with a spurt of shame; was it any wonder she felt as though the very darkness itself, his one friend and ally, disapproved of her? What had she done to earn her welcome here? Once upon a time and not so very long ago, she had imagined her Angel of Music ruled over the sparkling world of her father's stories, king of all things bright and wondrous; he was no such thing, but this, such as it was, was still his home. His kingdom.

_Not an angel, but perhaps . . perhaps king of goblins. Still something regal and noble and fearsome and wondrous. And mine._

_He called himself a loathsome gargoyle. A repulsive carcass._

The charcoal faces cried out their cheerfully malicious agreement with that sentiment, loud despite their silence, and the lake murmured its disdain of her.

_He wanted to give me wonders, Madame Giry said._

It was not quite the magical kingdom she had imagined, but this was his _home_, his refuge, and those awful faces had no right to intrude into it.

Trying to ignore the cold and the unshakeable sensation of the lake watching her from the dark, Christine strode purposefully to the wall and began to pry the first sketch she reached away.

* * *

"He did speak to her!" Meg insisted. "She told me, just three nights ago, that a voice had been speaking to her ever since she came here. She believed it was an angel, sent by her father. She used to believe so, anyhow." 

"Yes, he did speak to her," Antoinette acknowledged.

"How could you let him?" Meg demanded. "How could you let her be deceived, and in such a cruel way, to think that her dead father -"

"I did not _let _him," Antoinette corrected her, with a voice that was calm and level but a spine that was far too straight and an expression of brittle, affected indifference – expecting judgment. "I _asked _him to watch over her."

"You – you asked him -" Meg parroted, sure she was somehow misunderstanding. Her mother would not do such a thing.

"I could not spend hours every day hiding in the corridors outside the chapel," Antoinette explained. "I had other responsibilities – I had you," she said pointedly, "and the other girls. But I could not just abandon her, and so I asked him to listen, and tell me if she spoke of anything of consequence – if she were ill, or cold, or if her stockings had holes in them or she'd outgrown her shoes, anything, all the things I could have expected another child to bring to me herself."

"Then you didn't ask him to pretend to be her angel," Meg sighed, relieved.

"No," Antoinette acknowledged, "and when he told me what he had done, I was very angry with him, until he explained."

"What explanation could he possibly give that would justify that?" Meg asked incredulously.

"Her angel thought perhaps she would be happier in heaven, where her father was," Antoinette responded simply.

"He – he told her to kill herself?" Meg had to fight to keep from shrieking the words, horrified.

"No!" Antoinette snapped, then sighed. "No, of course not. He is not a monster, Marguerite, any more than she is, that is what I am trying to explain."

"But you said -"

"I said, that she received this advice from her angel," Antoinette repeated. "He told me they discussed it for several nights in a row, in increasing detail, though of course he was privy to only half of the conversation. It was at the point where she began to contemplate aloud which colors of paint might be most poisonous that Erik joined the discussion."

"He – but – he was her angel," Meg insisted faintly. "Your ghost was her angel. He was the voice that she heard."

"He became her angel," Antoinette corrected. "But no, Meg, he was by no means the only voice she heard."

* * *

Christine gave a small, quickly stifled cry as the curling edge of a sheet of paper slid into the pad of her middle finger. She stuck the wounded digit into her mouth and cringed, spinning and staring about her with wide eyes. The echo of her pained yelp reverberated down damp corridors and across the dim, rippling surface of the lake, the sound transmuted into something fey and alien by the time it died away. The hot copper tang of blood was sharp on her tongue, just briefly, then gone. 

It was quiet again, save for the distant dripping that never seemed to cease. And the odd, small sounds from the walls that she could only assume were rats, at home in their own burrows. And the way the softly undulating lake seemed almost to breath, sucking at the smooth stone shore with an obscene, wet lisp.

Smoke and steam from the scores upon scores of candles rose around her like mist, and it was so very, very cold.

Christine pulled her finger from her mouth and inspected it; the cut wasn't deep or even very painful, but it disturbed her. The whirling pattern of her skin parted like cut leather which, she thought, was really an absurd comparison to make, wasn't it? Leather _was_ skin, or at least had been, when it was alive. The cut oozed a thin reddish fluid, not quite blood. Of course cut skin would look like scraps of leather.

Erik had masks of leather, two or three of them, one left sitting on the arm of a chair, one adorning the plaster bust of a Roman senator, and the last – where had she seen the last? It was brown leather. She'd thought it looked far more comfortable than the porcelain that she assumed he wore habitually – but then, did she know? She'd only seen him three times.

The brown leather mask had ties on its sides. He thought ties were not sufficiently reliable, and so he pasted his porcelain mask to his face – pasted it there and forgot about it until the glue melded with his skin. She'd kicked that mask – gently – underneath the table that housed his miniature of the Opera stage, so that she wouldn't have to look at it. Perhaps later, when she felt braver, she'd take it to the little wash-room she'd found, and clean the bits of things from the back of it.

She didn't want to; she wanted to hurl the thing into the lake and never see it again. There were pieces of skin stuck to it, she was very sure now, having looked again. She'd peeled the skin from his face when she pried it away; she remembered the sound it had made, and had to swallow rapidly, eyes squeezing shut, empty stomach threatening rebellion.

At her back, the lake breathed.

Christine shook herself, blinked determinedly, and returned to her self-appointed task. A space of wall as tall as she was and three times as wide had been emptied of jeering charcoal faces. Much of it was bare stone, but there had been other things beneath as well – architectural sketches and diagrams she did not understand, lines precisely measured, angles noted, feverish scribblings adorning the margins, full of question marks and circled words and heavy underlining. She thought one might be a bridge; it clung to the edge of a swath of beautiful red cloth, which was now covered in greasy spots left behind by the sticking paste. The edge of what appeared to be a watercolor of a fantastic, opulent cityscape peaked out from beneath a jaggedly torn sheet of paper bearing the countenance of a round-eyed woman. She was stuffing her knuckles in her mouth as if trying not to scream.

He had somehow captured perfectly the stretching of her skin at the corners of her wide, horrified mouth. Her shocked eyes were charcoal, her fist a thing of lines and smudges, but her mouth, half-obscured, was utterly real. Her thwarted scream hung un-uttered in the air, her terrified disgust a palpable thing.

Christine reached out pale, shivering hands and tore her down. The movement caused a small wave to pass through the remaining papers. They fluttered like leaves - or perhaps a plague of soft-winged insects, jittering, awaiting some excuse to rise into panicked flight and swarm around her.

Christine blinked repeatedly, pressing her eyelids closed until she saw stars, trying to still her shaking, but it was so cold.

The lake lapped and sighed at her feet, making her want to glance over her shoulder just to be sure it hadn't crept closer, but she didn't. She couldn't remember precisely how far away it had been before, which meant she could never tell for certain that it was still, and thus never be reassured. It was better not to look, no matter how it muttered at her.

She curled the drawing she held in around itself so that the sticky edges faced together and the image was protected on the inside. The inhuman mob at her back settled slowly, whispering amongst themselves in papery voices. The lake answered with soft, wet sighs.

The sketch made a tube, and the cookie-cutter edge of it was a shape that was almost a heart, but lacking the point at the end. If she creased the papers just opposite the place where the sticky edges met, they would make hearts, but then that would ruin the images inside.

She wanted to ruin the images inside, she wanted to _burn _them, but she didn't know what Erik wanted. He'd made them. Perhaps he felt some affection for them, impossible though that seemed.

Erik had called this his hell. If these were souls in hell, shouldn't they burn? Shouldn't they burn away and torment the living no more?

But if he conjured them here, then what was he? The devil's child, he's said on the roof. The devil was once an angel and the children of angels were the nephilim, and they were monsters. That had always seemed wrong to her. They were the children of angelswho had found mortal women fair, so shouldn't they have been beautiful? Why was it wrong for an angel to see the beauty, the good in a mortal being?

Her father said she would understand when she was older. She was older, now; she didn't understand.

The lake whispered at her, and the dank passages that lead off around her dripped. She could imagine them to be mouths, full of sharp teeth and great slavering tongues. _Stay in the light. _

She set the curled picture which was not exactly a heart down on the floor behind the miniature opera house, adding it to the growing pile of its fellows. She'd smeared some of them accidentally; she hoped desperately that Erik wouldn't be angry. Maybe he wouldn't even want them; maybe they could burn them together, later, or feed them to the lake. Christine only knew that she couldn't leave them on the walls and remain sane.

The watercolor of the beautiful, surely imaginary city was half-revealed now, full of gleaming spires and improbable arches, awash in brilliant hues. Its sun was rising.

The next face belonged to an old man, grimacing in bored distaste, utterly dismissive. No part of him stood out in such perfect detail as had his erstwhile neighbor's mouth, but the expression of complete disdain had been captured clearly, made of heavy, powdery black lines.

Christine wanted to reach out her charcoal-smudged hand, her cold-numbed fingers, and just wipe him away. It would be easy, heavily drawn as he was, all that ash just waiting to smear into nothing. It would turn the palm of her hand black.

Black like burns, muttered the lake. _Your angel is dead, and this is his hell. _

She peeled the old man carefully from the wall and tucked his edges in, hiding his face. Her angel was asleep in his bed, his goblin's face turned towards the pillow, still in his shoes because she hadn't the nerve to undress him. This was not hell, it was his home, and she would defend it for him. On freezing, quivering legs she walked the old man over to the pile of sketches and set him gently down, curled into a shape that was not quite a heart. So many of them, and the greater part of the wall remained covered. _So, so many – _she backed up still staring blearily at the heap of them, and her hip caught the edge of the table that held the miniature opera house.

Something fell with a clatter, and she gave a startled shriek. Her foot jostled the stack of curled sketches as she spun towards the noise, and the papers rolled, abandoning her neat arrangement to go spinning across the floor. Christine scrambled away from the touch of them, imagining charcoal-rendered hands reaching out to grab at her ankles. She stopped at other side of the miniature opera house's table, watching with wide eyes and rapid pulse as the curled papers settled into corners, skittled away under his bookshelves and ensconced themselves amongst the feet of the candelabras. Her breath came fast and shallow, and the air tasted of cold and damp and dark.

Something was rocking back and forth down by her toes, the thing that had clattered, slow to settle; his seal stamp. She picked it up hastily, wanting to stop the noise. It leered up at her with the grinning face of a skull, bits of red wax caught in his teeth.

Christine dropped the seal back onto the table and hurried to the bedroom, ducking beneath the black mesh curtain that obscured the doorway. It clung to her like spiders' webs, and she flailed, biting her lip to keep from screaming as she batted at it, trying to dislodge it from her hair. It released her reluctantly.

She turned to the bed; he still slept, apparently undisturbed by the noise she'd made. Christine stood there long enough to be sure his ribs rose and fell, then set her shoulders and ventured back out. She was careful to grab up huge handfuls of the curtain and hold it well away from her as she passed this time, though touching it now repulsed her; she half expected it to be sticky.

She could imagine the spider that would spin such a web, a huge bloated thing, pale and grey – she stopped, looking back through the black webbing towards the bedroom.

In her mind's eye, fat, poisonous spiders climbed the walls and hung from the ceiling, over her sleeping angel, her goblin king. They would come out now that she'd woken them, once she left him and all was still –

_- no, no, there are no spiders. It's just a curtain. Lace._

_Lace made of silk which is made of cocoons, spun by moth worms, great fat worms like great fat spiders – _

The lake hissed and slurped behind her, and the tunnels seemed to lick their lips.

_This is his hell._

She spun slowly, torn, towards the antechamber; dozens of those horrible, mocking charcoal faces remained, pointing their cruel fingers at her, staring at her, weighing her, judging her, finding her pitifully wanting. _This is not his hell. I will not let it be. _

_But it is so cold. _

His cloak lay sprawled across the bench, before the pipe organ. Christine tip-toed that far still caught in indecision, eyes darting between the jeering paper crowd that taunted her and the silent, spider-web doorway to the bedroom. She noticed as she passed that many of the candles were burnt down to stubs; some had gone out, drowned in their own wax. _Stay in the light. _She reached for the cloak.

Something small and brown leapt from it as she lifted it, running away along the edge of the wall. Christine froze.

_It is just a rat. Only a rat. _Her entire body was shaking, her teeth chattering. On the bench lay a slender sword, its pommel a grinning death's head. The cloak had obscured it.

Down the stairs, where the rat had run, Christine heard the piled sketches rustle. The image of gnawing rodent teeth tearing into those charcoal faces sprang sharp and vivid into her mind. It would rip them to shreds and make a nest of them – _a nest of screaming mouths and round eyes and jabbing fingers – _

Christine clutched the cloak to her chest, grabbed up the sword, and scurried back to the bedroom. She shuddered as she passed the curtain, her eyes scanning the ceiling frantically lest a bulbous, many-legged body drop on her unawares.

The ceiling remained bare stone, Erik remained asleep, and the candles burned low and flickering.

With a shuddering sigh, Christine untwisted the cloak from around her hands and slung it over her shoulders. It was heavy and too long, but warm. She tucked the edge of it beneath her and sat on the floor at the foot of the bed, letting her head fall back against the elegant metal neck of the sculpted swan. A glance up and sideways showed its eyes blank and its beak wickedly sharp; Christine looked hurriedly down and away, grimacing and shutting her eyes.

_Think of it as a friend; that dreadful beak is to defend him. It would snatch up the spiders and eat them. _

She set the sword across her knees and clung white-knuckled to the hilt.


	5. Chapter 5

Author's Notes: Several reviewers have commented on Christine's mental state. So, a few thoughts on this; first of all, my depiction of the character and her symptoms is based largely on what was presented in movie canon, and not on a set of diagnostic criteria out of the DSM. As such, the symptoms she exhibits do not fit perfectly with any one diagnosis.

That said, it's not exactly unusual that a person who obviously has _some _manner of mental illness doesn't fit a single diagnosis exactly, so I don't feel too badly about that.

It was not my intention to portray her as schizophrenic; childhood-onset schizophrenia is extremely rare, would have a very poor prognosis without modern medical treatment, and would likely result in far more severe symptoms after 10 years untreated. You can find information on childhood-onset schizophrenia at www [dot schizophrenia [dot com [slash family [slash childsz [dot htm.

I am not a psychologist, and would not try to diagnose anyone who was not fictional, but I think Christine's symptoms are most characteristic of depression with psychotic features – here's an article on that: www [dot nlm [dot nih [dot gov [slash medlineplus [slash ency [slash article [slash 000933 [dot htm. I found no stats on the prevalence of psychotic depression in children, but uncomplicated depression is considerably more common in children than is schizophrenia. I have some personal experience of depression, so I can say that some of what Christine seems to experience in canon, and certainly what I've written of her, is familiar stuff for me.

This is primarily an artistic, not educational, endeavor – if Christine's troubles ring true for anyone else, I'll be ecstatic, but no one should take this fic as a guide to mental illness or its appropriate treatment.

As for Erik – I think he clearly suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, but I don't think that's all, and I'm not even going to try to venture a guess as to the rest. I'm writing him according to canon as best I can – Leroux and Webber can take credit/blame for whatever realism or lack thereof there may be to his various physical and mental afflictions.

* * *

Something landed soft and heavy on Christine's head. She jerked upright with a cry, fumbling free of her formless assailant with clumsy hands and bleary, blinking eyes. She scuttled backward, Erik's sword held defensively before her and trying to convince her eyes to focus. She didn't know when she'd fallen asleep.

The thing that had accosted her came into grudging focus in the dim light of far fewer candles than she remembered; a sheet. Erik was struggling up onto his elbows on the bed, eyes wide.

"It -" Christine gestured at the offending piece of cloth with the sword, realized what she'd done, and blushed furiously. She lowered the blade to her side and shrugged the hood of his cape – knocked askew in the course of her sleep-addled clash with the sheet – the rest of the way off her head. "It fell on me," she concluded in a small voice. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake you."

He just stared.

"I was cold," she offered in rueful explanation for her theft of his cape, staring down at her shoes. Her heart was still pounding very hard. The sword glinted darkly in the meager light. "And frightened," she added even more softly. "I'm very foolish. I'll put them back."

"No," he responded, his voice a sleepy rasp. He cleared his throat as she glanced up. "Keep them if you like," he said in a more normal tone. "It was only – the sight of you -" he stopped and looked down at his hands; some of the blisters had scabbed, but the largest of them, on the ring finger of his left hand where a pencil would rest, remained open and raw. The joints looked swollen. "I should not attempt to hold a pencil," he observed sourly.

"I don't think so," Christine agreed, hedging towards the bed.

"The sight of you – the cape flew around you, when you stood, and the sword -" he tried to explain, gesturing and frowning. His hands trembled at the high point of their waving, and dropped quickly to the sheets. "- and your hair -" His fingers stirred weakly.

"I must have looked absurd," Christine argued tentatively.

"No, no!" he retorted, almost angrily, his mouth pressing into a grimace she might have called petulant on another face. "You were a vision – all dark and gleaming and – the cape – like wings, Christine, it was like wings."

"I'm pleased if you see me so," she ventured, biting her lip; somehow she'd ended up beside the bed. She laid the sword down by his feet and sat on the edge. "You really shouldn't use your hands, though," she whispered.

"No," he agreed unhappily; then, with very determined conviction; "It matters not; the image will not leave me."

At this thought he blinked, eyes darting sideways to her face as if he'd just come to some unpleasant realization. He brought his right hand immediately to the same side of his own face, covering his disfigurement. "Forgive me -"

"Stop that," Christine interrupted sharply, her hand flying out and taking hold of his wrist, drawing his hand away.

"I would not burden you further with a sight you may wish to forget," he insisted, staring as if transfixed at her hand about his wrist.

"I do not wish to forget," Christine replied, her own eyes likewise drawn to their hands; she let her grip grow lax and allowed his hand to slip into her own. Their fingers twined, oh so carefully, mindful of his injuries. "You kicked the sheets away," she observed, her tone tremulous and strained. "You are uncomfortable – of course you are, in your shoes. I'm a terrible nurse."

"You are a miracle," he countered.

"You really, really must cease saying such things," Christine objected, her voice rising another octave. "I don't know how to answer and it makes it very difficult to think."

She had no idea from whence her courage came, to make such a protest; her face felt hotter than the flames of the dying candles, and the entire situation seemed very much like a dream.

"Are there more candles?" she asked, trying to blink the sleep from her eyes and staring fixedly at their tangled fingers; they'd come to rest on the bed just to one side of his leg. Having looked away, she found that she could not look up again; she felt as if she might die if their eyes met. "I don't know how long I slept – I suppose not long, as Madame Giry has not yet returned, but the candles are beginning to burn down. Are there more?"

"Antoinette will bring her own torch," he answered; he sounded as if he too struggled with the mundane topic, as if other words demanded to be spoken, but he held them back. "Do you wish for more light than this?"

"Oh," Christine responded. "I suppose we don't need to keep the whole place lit, then, do we? It's wasteful. You must use scores of candles down here, it must be expensive – no, of course not, I don't need -"

"Don't think of the expense," he interrupted hastily. "It is inconsequential. Do you want light?"

"No," Christine repeated, almost inaudibly. "No, it is all right."

"You do," he insisted. "You do want more candles lit; why are you lying?" An edge began to creep into his voice; Christine clung to his hand and shook her head, feeling slow and muddled and still half-asleep.

"I'm sorry," she whispered waveringly, exhausted tears hovering.

The room went quiet, though Christine could feel her angel's eyes on her.

"I've upset you," Erik said after a long moment; he still sounded frustrated, verging on angry.

"No, I upset you," Christine insisted, eyes clenched momentarily shut, as if she could squeeze the lingering dregs of sleep from them. "I just don't want to waste your candles, that is all. It can't be easy to get them here, and I know you don't want me to mind the expense but I can't help think of it, and truly, I don't need them."

Shaking, calloused fingers took hold of her chin and lifted her face. Their eyes met; she did not die, though she felt vaguely as if something in the center of her melted into fizzling sparks.

His expression gentled and his fingers brushed her cheek before dropping away; she exhaled shakily and forced herself to loosen her grip, embarrassed to realize she'd been clutching his hand tight enough to interfere with circulation.

"I do want more candles," Christine conceded shakily, letting her lips quirk up into half a smile. He echoed it, and her heart lurched; had she ever before seen him smile, even that much? "But I want not to want them, more. It would be a waste, and I do not want to waste your things," she repeated, and felt cowardly for her choice of words, though she could think of none better. She wanted to be frugal with his things, yes - and to care for his hurts, and mend his socks and cook him soup.

She had never really handled money, was proving to be a completely useless nurse, could barely stitch a straight line, and felt it likely that she'd burn the opera down if she attempted to operate a stove. None of this seemed to have any impact on the shape her wantings took. _I want . . home. With him. _

"I want to give you things you want," Erik insisted. "Everything, anything you want."

"You do," Christine responded, and frowned, wants and unspoken words all twisted up into nonsense that she couldn't possibly express. "You – you give me things _to _want. You -" she gestured helplessly with her free hand.

He swallowed heavily.

"- you must be thirsty," she concluded, lips quirking up again, laughing at herself. "I want," she pronounced determinedly, "to bring you a glass of water, and to take off your shoes. May I have that?"

"Of course," he answered, though he continued to frown.

Retrieving a glass of water involved leaving his side and venturing back out through the thick web of black lace at the door, neither of which she had considered. Having set herself to this task, however, she would not retreat from it. _What use am I if I cannot even bring him a drink of water, for fear of the dark?_

_I must learn to love it – I must think of it like a difficult, ill-tempered pet, this darkness of his. It is just jealous of my intrusion, and I must teach it to love me. _

Erik instructed her carefully how to find another small alcove that hid - she thought, though the caves twisted and whirled her about into confusion - directly behind the room with the tub and the great fissure in its floor. The back wall of his odd little kitchen was less of a wall and more of a slope, not quite meeting the floor, and the chasm from the bathing room continued along its edge, widening as it went. More pipes snaked up out of it, disappeared into chiseled holes in the upward incline of the chamber, then poked their metallic noses back out to pour into a basin carved into the rock. It drained not into another pipe, but directly into that great crack in the uneven, sloping floor.

Where the chasm grew wide enough to accommodate a human form with little effort, he'd set boards across it – a little square of polished wooden floor such as might grace any fine home, just big enough to hold a delicate table and two chairs. It was the perfect setting for an elegant brunch, except that the little porcelain bowl that ought to have held sugar for tea was instead serving to catch the drips from a stalactite overhead. The boards echoed fantastically when tread upon.

Further around the wall – it began to curl up and outward again, like a chimney – sat a fat-bellied iron stove, and a little ways from this, a china cabinet with etched glass doors.

His dishes didn't match, though they were uniformly gleaming and opulent, many of them edged in gold. Christine selected a crystal goblet nervously, wincing at the way the dishes jangled when the cabinet was disturbed. He had too many in too small a space, really; they would have overwhelmed his quaint table, when all set out. There was, in dribs and drabs, service for at least twelve there; she wondered with a pang if he imagined giving grand dinner parties.

A feast for all the things that hide and scurry – rats and spiders and ghosts and trolls and goblins – and my goblin king at the head of the table, resplendent in the dark –

Christine filled the goblet with icy water from the tap, her hands shaking, and then scampered back to the bedroom with his cape fluttering darkly behind her.

He had already removed his shoes when she returned, and had set his fingers to bleeding again in the process. This sent her scurrying back out to the antechamber by the lake to retrieve the rags she'd left there; she tried not to look up at the faces that still remained on the walls, but ultimately couldn't help herself.

She was surprised at how flat they were. _Just made of ash. _

It was disturbing enough to draw her to them, frowning and entranced; certainly they still demonstrated the great artistic genius of their creator, but the life seemed to have left them. The fear that they might at any moment spring from their pages had vanished, and the thought that it might be morning, up above the ground, whispered through Christine's mind. She touched her finger to a heavy swirl of charcoal, the line of a haughty, grimacing woman's jaw – it felt papery and dry. When she pulled her hand back, her fingertip was smeared with black.

Black like burns.

But old burns. Old scars, that's all they are. What a fool I am.

She scrubbed her finger clean on her skirt and thought again of morning as she picked through the rags to find any that remained clean, and came to the realization that she ought to get fresh water for the pitcher. This necessitated another trip to the taps; the bathroom was closer, so that was where she went, pouring the dirty water down into the chasm in the floor. It was still, slumbering. _The light will be coming in the windows of the dormitory, pale and gray, making the dust dance. It will smell of cold air and warm bodies and too many kinds of perfume all together, and very soon, of baking bread. _

Her stomach rumbled; she decided it might be wise to make use of the facilities while she was there, and did so, blushing faintly all the while. There was something very odd about using her angel's toilet. _But he's not an angel. He's just a man. _

_My king of music and darkness._

_Mine. _

It was strange and sweet and frightening, to wash her hands in his sink, the water icy enough to be painful, and to begin to imagine it also _her _sink. Her lips curved into an embarrassed little smile at the thought of two whole sinks, all her own. _Just think how crowded the washrooms will be upstairs, in a few hours – imagine having this place all to myself._

_This dark, strange place. _

She tilted that thought this way and that in her mind, weighing and measuring it against the clear mental image she had of her life upstairs, and then, guiltily, of her childhood daydreams of a life with Raoul, when he was to have come and rescued her like some knight in shining armor.

She had imagined being the mistress of a grand house, but somehow she had never imagined being an adult. In all her dreams they had remained children, Raoul and she, playing at lord and lady. These dreams had all taken place in the day, and somehow never ventured as far as night and beds and what it meant to be grown and married. Sometimes, only sometimes, she imagined he would kiss her. It would be in a garden full of pink roses, and after they would walk in the sunlight, holding hands and smiling.

Erik was scowling and dabbing at his bleeding fingers with the edge of his dirty shirt when she returned; she tsked and hurried to his side to stop him, giving him a scolding look that made him flinch and her stomach somersault so hard that it felt it might hit the roof of her mouth and bounce. _I must grow braver!_

They were both quiet as she washed his hands again; he never winced in pain, so she did for him, and in her mind examined her dreams of sunny rose gardens.

She knew now that it would never have been that way; the giggling whispers of the other girls of the ballet came to her, talk of sinful things that she had tried to ignore. Such things had never been associated in her mind with Raoul or with marriage; sitting here on the edge of a man's bed with the rank smell of his unwashed body clinging to the back of her throat, they had to be. That was what it meant, she told herself determinedly, to give one's self to a man – it meant things to do with night and dark and bodies. Those girls who had done it said that it sometimes hurt.

She ripped a strip of dry cloth from one of the rags and bound it around the ring finger of his left hand, where the largest of his blisters still seeped and would not scab. Bandaging fingers was more complicated than she would have imagined, and her first attempt left her too little cloth to tie it in place, so that she had to unwrap it halfway and try again.

If she stayed, if she was his, he would touch her with those hands. Her body would no longer be only her own. Raoul would have wanted the same, she thought, difficult though it was to imagine.

She raised Erik's bandaged hand to her lips and kissed the tips of his fingers, still frowning; it made him shake.

She could go back upstairs when Madame Giry came, and not come back here. She could belong to no one but herself, not Erik and not Raoul and neither the dark nor the light.

I could be a ghost.

Her angel watched her, still silent; she smiled shakily and brought the goblet of water to his lips.

"Little bits," she instructed quietly. He sipped; his throat worked. "Not too much," she admonished, pulling the glass away. He gasped a little when she did; she wondered if perhaps he could not breathe very well through his nose. That seemed unlikely, though; he could not sing so beautifully, were that the case.

He licked his lips; his tongue was wet. Her own tongue touched the inside of her upper lip, then withdrew quickly; she felt suddenly absurdly aware of it.

"Is it all right?" she asked. "Do you feel ill?"

"No," he said, shaking his head and swallowing again. "Thank you."

"More?" she asked.

He opened his mouth, paled suddenly, grimaced, and swallowed frantically. His eyes clenched shut for a moment. He licked his lips again. "No," he said hoarsely, eyes blinking open. "I think I'd better not."

"In a little while," Christine suggested, setting the glass down beside the bed. "I was very ill once, when I was much younger. I remember it was dreadful to try to learn to eat again; I was so hungry, and everything smelled divine, but my stomach wanted none of it."

"I remember," Erik responded, watching her warily.

"Oh," Christine said, flustered. "Of course you do."

"I wasn't your angel yet," he said, "But I remember Antoinette was frantic. What was it you finally ate – those little almond pastries?"

"Yes," she said, the flavor of them suddenly there on her clamoring tongue. _What does he mean, he was not yet my angel?_ "Yes, I – I like almonds very much," she responded inanely, letting that discordant thought scurry away.

"I shall have them delivered by the wagon-full," he offered, a querulous attempt at a smile curving his lips. "Every day."

It accentuated the sagging of the skin below his right eye; the flattened side of his nose did not move as it should, as though the flesh were hard, and his cheek wrinkled around it.

But he was her angel, sitting right there, so close, and he was smiling. It was not a thing of sunny rose gardens, but whatever feeling this was that she could not name, she didn't want to give it up.

"I don't need almonds every day," she retorted, smiling back at him. "I'd grow sick of them."

"What else, then?" he asked. "Chocolates? The finest of meats? Champagne?"

"A kiss," she blurted, the words spoken before they were thought.

His face went utterly blank in shock.

_Oh dear God, why did I say that? He will think I'm a whore, like the managers do, like everyone - _

"Oh, forget that!" she exclaimed, going scarlet. "Please, forget I ever said such a -"

"A -" he attempted to speak, but had to stop, swallowing. He was shaking very hard. She quieted. "A kiss," he repeated back to her. "Every day?"

_Oh – oh. Oh dear. _She had not meant it to be a promise.

She thought of hands and skin and sweat and giggling whispered things, her own shameful private explorations and Madame's frank explanations of how a girl gets with child. She thought of music and his bleeding fingers and blood-red roses and the puzzled look on Raoul's face up on the roof, and of Erik's cape – Erik's cape swirling out behind her as she leapt to her feet, and the look in his eyes. _Like wings, Christine, it was like wings. _

_Great black wings. Hundreds of birds, all taking off and swirling into the sky – _

They'd done none of the things Madame warned against, but Christine felt as though he'd planted something within her, the seed of something that would not grow into sunny pink roses. _Something that wants dark and safe and that look in his eyes to grow, and I cannot deny it the chance. I think perhaps I ought to run, but I don't want to. _

"Yes," she responded, her voice gone soft and trembling to match his. "I think I want that."

"Now?" he asked in a wondering rasp.

"Yes," she responded, nearly inaudibly. He leaned towards her, and her heart hammered; then he scowled, and pulled back.

"What -" she began to ask, stricken.

"Christine," he began awkwardly, his face red, "I've been –" he gestured defeatedly, out towards the room by the lake, "- as you've seen. You don't want to kiss me now."

"I do!" she insisted; it was nearly a wail, so anxious and overwhelmed that the line between excitement and tears was very, very thin.

"I have not scrubbed my teeth in several days," he said bluntly.

"Oh," Christine responded, drawing slightly away; her tongue seemed to want to crawl into the back of her throat at the thought. Her own teeth, she realized abruptly, felt somewhat less than clean.

The tension of the moment broke, just like that. There was something dizzyingly ridiculous about the banality of it, and she giggled; he flinched as though she'd struck him.

"No, no!" she protested, reaching out to cup his chin in one hand and tilt his face back up to hers. "I was thinking – it's not been days, but I haven't since last morning, either. And besides – besides teeth, I was on stage, under all of those lights, and – we're both positively disgusting," she concluded.

He still looked wary, tense and awaiting a blow. Her thumb stroked his cheek, all on its own – this habit that the various bits of her had developed of acting without consulting her was really quite disconcerting.

And yet, she felt so very strangely light, small and safe, hidden there with him in all their mutual repulsiveness. He was looking at her as if she held the very world in the palm of her hand and might crush it on a whim.

"Keep your lips closed, please, Sir," she whispered, in the best imitation she could manage of the teasing tones she'd heard from the other girls of the ballet.

He went pale and, much to her vexation, his lips parted ever so slightly – then he seemed to realize it, and clamped them shut. She leaned forward.

His lips were hot and dry and soft beneath hers; they just brushed, and then his hand came up to tangle in her hair, cupping the back of her neck and holding her there. Her eyes opened to find his open also, mere inches away.

She couldn't quite focus on him, close as they were, but her lips curved into a smile, and then his did as well. She didn't think that one was really supposed to smile in the midst of kissing, but she couldn't seem to stop. His nose was bumping hers and his breath was very hot on her skin. He tilted his head, his still-closed lips slanting across hers in a gentle caress as his thumb found the tender, hollow spot at the base of her skull and stroked there. It brought fire rushing up her neck and down her spine, a shivering heat that made her skin tingle. She wanted their bodies closer together, wanted the press of him against her, something to comfort the feeling that she might simply fly apart. _Like wings, hundreds of wings, spiraling dizzy up – up – up – _

He drew away, averting his face as his lips parted and he gasped for breath. She smiled uncertainly when he looked up again, his eyes searching her face warily.

His expression relaxed when he saw the look on her face, but slowly, as if he did not quite believe what he saw at first. Piece by piece Christine could observe it, fascinated; his jaw lost its nervous tension, his brow gave up its rigid set, and his eyes – she could not say exactly what it was that changed about Erik's eyes as her own smile widened, but it was a wonderful, weightless feeling to be the cause of it.

And then without her having seen it happen at all, he was smiling back at her.

Oh yes, I want this every day. Every single day.

He reached up to trace the shape of her mouth; she caught his hand in hers and kissed his fingertips, watching his eyes. His smile faltered, but it was all right, because she liked this next expression just as well. She turned his hand over and dropped a kiss into his palm. She felt the shudder that raced through him and grinned, ducking and hiding her blushing face behind his hand, though he must have felt the movement of her lips.

His fingers curled under her chin and tilted her face up, then curved around the line of her jaw so that he could touch her smile again, his thumb brushing across her lips almost like a kiss. There was a faint lilt remaining to his own mouth, half of a bemused grin. He tucked her disorderly hair behind her ear as his thumb continued its exploration, up over the curve of her cheekbone and then whispering around the corner of her eye, a ghost of a touch against her eyelashes as she blinked. His fingers skimmed the shell of her ear then slid down her neck, pausing at the place where she could feel her own pulse jumping.

She wanted to reciprocate in kind, but had enough sense remaining to refrain. His face was still uncertain territory, and Christine feared he would misunderstand if she wished to explore it. At some point in the course of the last few hours, it had ceased to be frightening or repulsive, and had become just _Erik_; she could imagine him no other way, and that she had never before seen a face like his was a point of curiosity that begged for further study.

In time; I don't need everything now. There will be other times.

_Every day. _

_But today he is ill, and should be resting. _

"Could you drink more water?" she asked. "You should try, little bits at a time, you'll feel better."

"I can feel your voice," Erik said, ignoring her question. His head tilted in curiosity and his thumb caressed her throat. His eyes were fixed on his hand on her neck, and his smile had grown, lopsidedly. "Speak again."

"What shall I say?" Christine asked. His grin deepened as she spoke.

"Anything," he said, mesmerized. "Sing."

"_Think of me,"_ Christine sang, watching his rapturous expression with a feeling like melting. _"Think of me fondly . . "_ Her voice trailed off into stillness and he glanced up, meeting her eyes. His hand was still on her throat.

"I love you," she said.

He stared, struck dumb and utterly still, for a long moment. Christine held his gaze and waited. It felt very much like the teetering, weightless moment before a fall.

"Should I not have said that?" she whispered, when the silence had grown too heavy to bear.

He took his hand away from her throat and swung his legs over the other side of the bed, attempting rather shakily to stand.

"I'm sorry!" Christine exclaimed, tears welling in her eyes and a feeling like lead in her stomach making her slow and clumsy as she scrambled around the bed. Erik managed to get his feet under him, but he looked none too steady. His face had drained of color when he stood, and his eyes were momentarily glassy and vacant. Christine hesitated to take hold of his shoulders, suddenly uncertain if her touch would be welcomed, and instead planted herself in front of him, near enough to grab if he started to fall. She blinked furiously, trying hard to keep her face composed. "I should not have said that, you must think I'm -"

"Christine," Erik interrupted, frowning down at her as if surprised to see her there. He glanced across the bed to where she'd been, then back to where she stood now. He still appeared to be having some difficulty making his eyes focus, and he was breathing heavily, exhausted by the simple effort of standing up.

"Don't go," Christine pleaded. "You should be resting. I'll go, if you want me to."

"Why would I want you to go?" he asked, his frown deepening. "No, I don't want -" He blinked and grimaced, then shook his head to clear it; just that small motion caused him to sway alarmingly on his feet.

Christine lurched uncertainly forward, prepared to catch him; he sat heavily on the edge of the bed, and she drew back, clutching her hands together. His face remained twisted into a fierce scowl for several seconds before his eyes opened to glower up at her. "Why would I want you to leave?" he demanded harshly. "Why would you ask that? Do you wish to go? You must – you must, damn you, or you wouldn't ask! You're mocking me – it's all a joke -"

"Of course not!" she retorted, tears spilling over. "I wouldn't -"

"Wouldn't you?" he accused. "Don't you? Why else would you say _that_ – and now you want to leave! Of course you do, why would you want to linger in the company this repulsive beast? You've had your fun at its expense - you've had your fun, damn you - making me believe -"

"I don't wish to leave!" Christine interrupted him in a shrill, desperate voice; she felt her own exhausted frustration sparking into anger. "I think the fever has disturbed your mind - it was you who were leaving!"

"Why would I be leaving?" he retorted, shouting. "Is this not my own home?"

"Of course it is, and I don't know!" Christine shot back. "How should I know that?"

"It was you who said it!" he bellowed.

"And you who did it, you stupid man!" she returned; his face flushed a furious red, and his hands clenched into shaking fists in the sheets. She saw her poor attempt at a bandage narrow and tighten about the ring finger of his left hand, and then blossom as red as his face. "And you're bleeding again!" she exclaimed in tearful exasperation, striding briskly to his side and snatching his hand up without thought.

He tried to pull away. "Stop that," Christine snapped, tugging his hand sharply back towards her in response to his flinch. Her own face had gone hot with embarrassment at her angry words, and she kept it averted, all her attention on his bleeding finger as she unwrapped the bit of rag that was now digging into his flesh, no doubt painfully.

"You know I don't truly think you stupid at all, but I'm very tired – and I ought to have more patience, I know, but I'm very -" She sniffled, tossed the bloody rag onto the floor, and looked about for the pitcher of water and clean rags. It was on the other side of the bed, of course, where she'd left it; she could have sobbed. "- I'm just overwrought," she finished in a small and strangled voice.

She dropped his hand into the sheets and pushed herself up, retrieving the pitcher. There was only one clean rag left, and her nose was running; she was half-way around the bed before it occurred to her that she should have taken a dirty one to use for a handkerchief. Going back for one such was entirely too much trouble, and so she scrubbed her nose on the back of her wrist, leaving a wet smear across her sleeve. She felt childish and disgusting for it, which fit her overall mood perfectly.

He'd pulled his hands back onto his lap, and was watching her once more with a cornered rat's bravado, fierce and glaring and yet twitching away when she sat next to him.

"Give me your hand," she requested. He did not move. "Please?" she tried again, her nose still running, the pitcher set awkwardly on one knee. It was cold; she was cold. His cloak had settled mostly beneath her, creating uncomfortable bunches of cloth under her legs and providing little in the way of warmth. "Erik, I'm tired," she pleaded, sniffling.

"Why would you make such a cruel joke?" he asked, his voice still tight and angry, but with a trembling thread of pain in it as well. "Christine, you must know – you _must _know -"

She looked up at him. "I must know what?" she asked wearily. "Will it matter at all if I swear I wasn't mocking you?"

He didn't answer, and his hands remained where they were, curled protectively around his arms. The bleeding seemed to have stopped on its own. She tied her one remaining clean rag carefully around the handle of the pitcher and set it down on the floor. "I should not have said it, anyway," she repeated in a small voice.

"You asked to leave," Erik accused, speaking in a tense whisper to the back of her bent head. "You swore you wouldn't, that you would stay here – that you would come back, on your own, you wanted to come back – but then you say – you say – and then you want to leave!"

Christine closed her eyes, and saw in the shuttered dark of her own mind all the pointing, jeering faces he had drawn.

_I want to give you things you want. _

_I want you to believe I wouldn't hurt you. Can you give me that? _

"Where were you going?" she asked; it was all she could think of to say that had not already been said.

"Going?" Erik repeated; still terse and wary, seeing a concealed barb in every syllable.

"You tried to stand," Christine reminded him in a voice that wobbled; without her pitcher and rags, she didn't know what to do with her hands. She began to pull fistfuls of his cloak out from beneath her, tugging it up around her legs. "I thought you wanted to get away from me, I thought I had offended you."

He wasn't offended, she saw that now, but also realized with grim, nigh-hysterical amusement that he could become offended yet, if she ever managed to convince him that she'd been in earnest.

"Must I admit it again?" he snapped, voice rising again towards anger. "Can you be so cruel?"

_Stop, _Christine thought exhaustedly. _Please, just stop. _

"I believed you," he repeated. "I thought – I let myself believe, that you could want . . . " His voice seemed to strangle itself.

"I do," she insisted, quiet and so very, very tired.

"Do not," he begged. "Do not torment me."

"I don't mean to," she answered miserably.

He was silent. She'd pulled as much cloak free as she could and wrapped it about herself like a cocoon, leaving her hands again purposeless, settled restlessly in her lap. He watched her; she could feel his eyes on her. _My angel. _She knew that feeling better than anything else in the world; even now, it was steadying, comforting. She wanted to laugh, and cry, and possibly be sick.

She did not laugh; she didn't want to know how he might interpret that. The silence dragged on.

"I – I cannot believe you," Erik confessed.

"I know," Christine responded with a sad little smile, understanding that his words had been chosen deliberately; not _do not, _but_ cannot._

_Not a choice. Just . . just old burns. _

"I should not shout at you, regardless," he offered; it was not quite an apology, but it was something.

"No," Christine agreed, as mildly as she could.

The room went quiet once more.

"I would not be offended," he ventured. "I was not offended. I stood because I was going to – to retrieve – no," he stopped abruptly, though he had her rapt attention. "No, I will not say it. Perhaps – perhaps later?" This last said with a note of tentative hope.

"Of course, later," Christine agreed. "Later when you're feeling better."

"You will be here." It was said flatly, and in a tone that warned of dire consequences were she not; it was none the less a question, and a desperate one at that.

"Yes," she agreed.

Quiet again. Christine looked down at her tangled hands. Then, his voice, almost inaudible: "Say it again?"

She looked up. "I – I still don't think I can believe it," Erik admitted. "Perhaps for another moment. I would like to hear it, anyway."

"I love you," Christine whispered.

"Oh, Christine," he sighed, shaking. "Christine, I love you. You must know how I love you."

She couldn't help but smile, trembling and terrified that the moment might burst like a soap bubble and plunge them back into confusion.

"I do," she said, with a helpless little shrug. "I do know it, though I want to hear it – I want to hear it every day," she offered; a careful, tentative grasp for the sweetness they'd found earlier, kisses and promises. It brought half an uncertain smile to his face, which was miracle enough to make her feel capable of flight. "Every day," she repeated, voice steadier. "It's all right – I can believe for both of us."

Erik reached out to cup her cheek in his hand, his thumb tracing the delicate skin beneath her eye. "But you are tired," he observed aloud. Her face was still a little damp with recent tears. He glanced behind him. "There is only the one bed." He took his hand away from her face to brace it on the edge of the bed frame, shoulders squaring, preparing again to stand. "It is yours, of course."

"Oh, of course not!" Christine protested, catching his arm. "You aren't well, you need rest. We -" She stopped, feeling again the heat of his scrutiny. It was tempting to look away, but instead she raised her chin. "I'll lay atop the sheets," she proposed determinedly. "In your cloak, and you'll lie beneath. It's likely it will be only a short time until Madame comes and wakes us both, anyway."

For a moment he just stared at her, looking utterly flabbergasted. Christine felt her still damp and sticky cheeks going very red, but held his gaze determinedly.

"Christine," he began carefully, and then one side of his lips quirked up in an uncertain twitch of a smile. "I would not find that restful. I do not know how I could sleep, with you laying beside me."

She hadn't thought her face could grow any hotter; she'd been wrong.

"Well you'd best learn, hadn't you?" Christine managed to choke out. She released his arm and gave his shoulder a half-hearted push. "Lay down, please? I'm very tired, and M. Reyer is casting _Faust _tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," he repeated, insinuating himself beneath the sheets and laying back in reluctant obedience, all the while eying her as though she might bite. "_Il Muto _has ended then?"

"Yes," Christine agreed, scooting herself up onto the bed with some difficulty, his cloak reluctant to loosen itself from her legs.

"You played the Countess."

"Yes," Christine affirmed again. "I was well received," she offered, hitching her shoulders self-consciously in a rather futile effort to make that statement sound somewhat less conceited than it must.

"I didn't hear you," Erik confessed mournfully.

Christine ducked her head and arranged cloak and sheets beneath her, smoothing out the wrinkles. There was a pang of disappointment; she'd known he hadn't been listening, of course, it was what had driven her to Madame in the first place. There'd been no rose – no accolade and no admonishment either. He'd never _ignore _her, of this she was certain, no matter how she disappointed him. So she'd reasoned, apparently correctly, that he simply wasn't there.

That he'd abandoned her, left her to fend for herself in the role in which he had placed her.

She knew that wasn't fair, but couldn't help the panicky little knot in her stomach, the urge to grab onto him and cling.

He's only ill because he didn't eat or sleep for days. He'll recover, and I won't let him ever do that again.

"The entire production was well received," Christine continued lightly, fussing with the cloak's hood, trying to fit it over a pillow. "Some of that may have been -" her eyes darted up to meet his, then down again, "- the scandal, but I don't think all, and anyway I suppose that will be remembered too. I'm sure we'll do it again." Another pause, settling her hair back over her shoulders. "They're calling it your opera, you know, the Phantom's Opera."

"Mine?" This brought Erik up on one elbow, indignant. "_Il Muto? _Mine?"

"Well they don't believe you wrote it," Christine clarified. He continued to look incensed. "Only that you are fixated upon it; that it's haunted."

"_Il Muto,_" he repeated, voice a strangled combination of incredulous, infuriated and pained.

"You'll have to haunt something else," Christine suggested.

"Immediately," he agreed fervently.

She smiled. "Lay down?"

He did, though he continued to frown. Emboldened by this more familiar side of him – how often had her angel ranted about M. Lefevre's musical selections? – Christine reached out to trace his furrowed brow. The skin felt papery and fragile, which she attributed to too many uninterrupted days spent trapped beneath the mask, but also warm and living. It was different, she discovered, to touch him this way, than to tend to wounds. Her fingers trailed gently around the orbit of his sunken eye; its lid fluttered closed.

She darted impulsively forward, tangled in cloak, to press a kiss to that closed eye. His lashes tickled her lips, and she could feel his trembling inhalation. She retreated just as quickly back to her pillow, a decent distance away and wrapped from toe to ear in heavy black cloth. His eyes blinked open, very bright, and she thought hers must look the same. Erik took her hand, twining their fingers together.

"I must grow used to this?" he asked shakily. "I must learn to sleep this way?" He made it sound like an utterly impossible task.

"Yes, you must," Christine returned shortly, smiling. "Now go to sleep." Very determinedly, she shut her eyes.


End file.
